


A Valiant Effort

by Sarah1281



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Parent Valjean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-03
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-28 00:10:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 73,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/668055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarah1281/pseuds/Sarah1281
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Valjean overcame some truly incredible odds to arrive at Arras in time to exonerate Champmathieu but sometimes people would rather just accept a convenient fiction instead of an awkward reality. Well, he tried.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Monsieur Bamatabois was absolutely horrified by this turn of events. He had been called upon to serve his community as a juror and met this task with equal parts annoyance and pleasure. The annoyance, of course, was because of the great inconvenience involved with reporting all the way to Arras and sitting through the trial (something which was taking far too long in his opinion given the obvious conclusion and had, indeed, dragged on so long that Madeleine had turned it completely on its head). The pleasure was because being a part of the body that decided a man's fate and helped the government to function was a rather heady feeling and just reinforced his own sense of importance. Not that he was in particular need of reaffirming here but it was nice nonetheless.

It had been a rather pleasant little affair. It hadn't been a murder so there was no potential to be disturbed and it was so strong a case that they should have only been there a few hours. With cases like these, the trial is really just a mere formality and Bamatabois often wished that they could just do away with trials altogether in this case. But he supposed that the government had to spend their tax dollars on something.

And then Madeleine had shown up and ruined everything. Four witnesses! There were four witnesses who swore positively that Champmathieu was Valjean! Four of them! How could four men be wrong? And even if three of them were mere convicts (and one of them an idiot on top of that), Bamatabois had long-since learned to respect and fear Javert's incorruptible dedication to the law. It was why he had scampered off after that what's-her-name harlot had randomly attacked him. He hadn't done anything wrong but you just never knew how someone like Javert might misinterpret things, now did you?

It had taken nearly an hour (another hour wasted! He may not have had any pressing business but he certainly had more pleasurable business) before the court had calmed down after Madeleine's absurd claims. Despite himself, Bamatabois had found himself rather amused by the way that the mayor had just insisted he was Jean Valjean and ought to be arrested and then he had simply left while everyone else was staring stupefied. Not that he blamed him, really. If he could leave he…well, he never would have shown up in the first place.

And now he was in the back with the other jurors deciding a matter that nobody had actually cared anything about in the first place and now cared significantly less about.

"This is just dreadful," one of his fellow jurors, a man with a rather prominent moustache, was saying, dabbing nervously at his brow with a handkerchief. "Monsieur Madeleine, a convict? I respected him!"

That was what Bamatabois had been afraid of. The word 'convict' had the remarkable effect in rendering everything it touched, no matter how pure or good before, to be filthy and vile. Already people were turning against Madeline.

Bamatabois didn't care for Madeleine's sake; he had liked the man as everyone else did but only in a vague, superficial sort of way and he wouldn't mourn his loss. Besides, even if his feelings had been deeper this was clearly something Madeleine wanted which made him think that there might have been something to the initial suggestion of madness.

No, Bamatabois had a far more practical reason to oppose this change. He had lived in Montreuil all his life and Madeleine had not been in town long enough for him to have forgotten what things were like then. To have Madeleine denounced as a convict and removed from his position as mayor and factory owner could very well send them all straight back to where they were eight years ago, especially as Madeleine had no natural successor. And while all of Madeleine's little charity cases did not interest him, his own prosperity – which had greatly risen in recent years – did and he would be damned if he let anyone, even the man responsible for it in the first place, ruin this for him.

There were three possibilities, as far as he could see. Madeleine was a convict, he was mad, or he was seriously taking his desire to save everybody ever far past the point of reason.

He did not know if Madeleine was actually a convict. He did not care. He was a thief? Well he had never stolen from him and these days he'd never need to.

He did not know if Madeleine was mad, either, and he was similarly apathetic. They had never actually spoke so he was unlikely to be affected by it. This sort of madness didn't seem to be dangerous to anybody except anybody who depended on Madeleine to stay put and not throw his life away and maybe it was a passing fancy. Or even if this was a recurring madness, if they could stop this now any subsequent confessions would be taken with a grain of salt and maybe disbelieved entirely.

He did not know if Madeleine just really had a problem with trying to save everybody. Everyone knew that he had installed some tart up in the hospital and behaved as though she were a countess. It wasn't too far a leap to imagine that there was literally nothing he would not do to save somebody that he felt deserved it. And while Bamatabois would hardly call the crude half-wit Champmathieu 'deserving', he did wonder at the difficulty the prosecution had had proving that the apple theft had occurred in the first place.

"I agree, this is most dreadful," a juror with a droopy eye concurred.

"I know that we are supposed to debate the matter first but since we all know that Champmathieu is innocent, I say that we should just vote now and save ourselves some time," a ginger juror suggested.

Moustache frowned consideringly. "Well, that is quite against the procedure they told us but since we are all going to vote to acquit, I don't see the harm in saving time. Discussing the matter when we all agree will hardly change anybody's mind."

Bamatabois cleared his throat and waited until all eyes were on him before he spoke. "I intend to do no such thing."

Ginger started. "You're not going to acquit Champmathieu? But…he's clearly innocent!"

Bamatabois crossed his arms and mentally prepared himself for what was sure to be a very trying ordeal that Madeleine would probably not even appreciate anyway. "How is he clearly innocent? Weren't you listening to the prosecution's case about them both being tree pruners from wherever that was and how his name is some sort of bastardization of Valjean's given name and his mother's surname? That can't possibly be a coincidence."

Droopy eye scratched his head irritably. "I do agree that the prosecution made a strong case and this sort of coincidence is very unlikely but that was before Madeleine explained everything to us."

"Be reasonable," Bamatabois said persuasively. "No one wants to let a convict go or waste taxpayer time and money so do you really think that they would claim that Champmathieu was Valjean unless they were absolutely certain? Do you want to believe that we live in a society where such a terrible case of mistaken identity was possible? I know that I wouldn't and so I do not believe it. I cannot believe it."

His words were clearly unsettling his fellow jurors, none of them wishing to believe such a thing either. Maybe it was out of concern for the kind of poor wretch who might get their identity mistaken like Champmathieu but more likely because they suddenly feared that they would find themselves in such a position. It was unlikely, though. Important people like those called upon to serve on juries did not have such things happen to them.

"But why would Madeline claim to be Valjean when he wasn't?" Mustache asked, flabbergasted.

Bamatabois shrugged. "I confess that I cannot be completely certain. If I had to guess, though, I would say that…We all know of Monsieur Madeleine is a veritable saint. He has taken it upon himself to singlehandedly save everyone he meets. Clearly he has heard of Champmathieu and, tenderheartedly if misguidedly, he has taken pity on a what he sees as a simple man and is trying to spare him from his just punishment."

"I know Madeleine's reputation well," spoke up a bald juror. "But that seems excessive, even for him."

Bamatabois shrugged. "I would have thought that as well but it seems that his generosity, which we have all seen to be boundless, really is without bounds and goes far past the point of reason. Do you know he's installed some…prostitute in the Montreuil hospital free of charge and is treating her like a countess? If he'd do that then who knows what he would do? I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to claim that he killed that horrible woman's baby, either. And maybe those two English princes."

He was beginning to convince them or at least sow seeds of doubt into their mind. That was good, that was very good.

"It's just common sense," he continued. "Monsieur Madeleine is a saint. He helps even those who least deserve his help and we have all benefited from his kind heart and his shrewd management. Jean Valjean is a vile convict and an idiot peasant. It's just impossible for one to have ever been the other. And that apple-stealing idiot Champmathieu is so clearly Valjean that it's ridiculous that we are even considering this. I would not go so far as to call Monsieur Madeleine mad but someone should really sit down and teach him a little something about the limits of reasonable behavior in his desire to help people."

"I've seen plenty of convicts in my time," Ginger said slowly. "They're miserable sots, they are. I don't see how anyone who was ever one of them, let alone one for nineteen years, could become someone as great as Monsieur Madeleine."

"The whole reason that convicts are made to carry their yellow papers with them everywhere is because everyone knows that they can never change and if Valjean and Madeleine were to be the same person he would have had to change so much as to be a completely different person," Moustache said consideringly. "He's right, there's just no way."

Back when Madeleine had initially made his claim, everyone had believed him. Everyone. Of course they had all sympathized and thought him noble, too, (someone had even opened the door for him!) and that impression had quickly faded so why not the other? No one wanted to believe such a thing could happen and so, if given an out, they would take it. All Bamatabois had to do was give them one.

Still, Baldy wasn't certain. "But how could he know those things about those convicts? Maybe one coincidence or bit of foreknowledge I could believe but he was three for three!"

"He also said that Javert would recognize him," Bamatabois said, trying to buy some time to think. "And Javert has served with Madeleine for years now and did no such thing as well as positively identifying Champmathieu."

"That does weaken his claim," Droopy Eye argued. "In my heart, I do not believe that they could be the same person. I don't believe that I ever truly did but I was so overwhelmed by this seemingly inexplicable conversation that I wasn't thinking clearly. Thank you for slowing us down and preventing us from maybe committing a terrible miscarriage of justice and bringing down a great man. But I simply cannot understand how else he could have known those things about those convicts?"

That speech had given Bamatabois sufficient time to come up with something. "Well, what did he say? He mentioned a detail about the clothing that one of them wore once but we have only the convict's word that that detail is correct and his word is worth so little he cannot even swear an oath!"

"But why would he lie?" Ginger asked, puzzled.

Bamatabois just stared at him.

"Oh, right, because he's a convict," Ginger realized, abashed.

"And no doubt he would enjoy bringing down such a great man as Monsieur Madeleine given his own miserable situation in life," Bamatabois added. "Then there's the second one. He claims that the man has a scar from when he tried to remove a tattoo but, despite the ease of proving this, we did not actually see said scar and tattoo. I, for one, find this highly suspicious, especially in light of the other man showing his tattoo."

"So even if they were lying, what about the third man and his tattoo?" Baldy asked. "He knew exactly what it was!"

"Everyone knew who the witnesses were," Bamatabois said indifferently. "Or at least they could if they had looked into the matter, which Monsieur Madeleine obviously has. A man like him, a man who can just enter the courtroom on a whim when no one is allowed in, he has ways. How difficult would it be to find out something about that convict? Who knows, maybe it's all true and he found a piece of information on all of them. It wouldn't be difficult. He just had to talk to someone who was once a guard. Maybe he even spoke with Javert about it, I don't know."

The jurors started murmuring to each other, looking much less grim now than they had when they thought that Madeleine was somehow Valjean.

"And if Monsieur Madeleine is not Valjean then we're left with what we had before," Moustache reasoned. "Champmathieu is Valjean and so must have stolen those apples and robbed that child."

Droopy Eye nodded seriously. "We must not let someone as good and kind as Monsieur Madeleine fall upon his sword for so unworthy of a person!"

Bamatabois sat back, smirking in satisfaction. This may all be true and it may not be but if it was then Madeleine's batterd conscience was hardly his concern. All that really mattered was that he had neatly dispatched with the interruption into his nice, orderly, prosperous life and life could go on as it had before.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Valjean couldn't bring himself to tell Fantine the truth of her child. The way Fantine looked right now, it was doubtful that she would live long enough to see Cosette even if he left to retrieve her right now. And considering what he had just done in Arras, it was unlikely that he would be able to successfully find and retrieve Cosette before the law caught up with him. He would try, of course, and keep trying until he died but he anticipated there would be…delays.

Maybe if he left now…but how could he leave her when she was so feverish, when she was chattering so excitedly about her dear daughter? He couldn't leave her alone.

Suddenly she stopped and Valjean glanced up at her to see that her face had lost all color and she sat still in frozen horror.

"Good God! What ails you, Fantine?" he cried.

Fantine did not reply verbally but instead gestured for him to look behind him.

Valjean turned around and saw Javert, looking terribly triumphant. He swallowed the lump in his throat and focused on maintaining an outwardly calm.

"Monsieur Madeleine, save me!" she begged.

Valjean rose. "Be at ease; it is not for you that he is come," he said, as gently as he could. He turned to Javert. "I know what you want."

"May I speak to you outside?" Javert requested.

That was not what he had been expecting, not at all. But…perhaps even Javert had enough pity in him to not want to cause a scene at the bedside of a dying woman?

Not daring to push his luck and do something to cause Javert to change his mind, Valjean quickly nodded. He managed a smile for Fantine and promised her that she would see Cosette soon. And perhaps, if the truth of his fate was kept from her, she would. It was a possibility.

Valjean followed Javert into the hall.

"It is done," Javert said triumphantly.

What was done? The deception? He supposed that was true but it was such a strange way to say it.

"Yes," he replied in a low, even tone. "It is."

"I have just received a message from Arras. The verdict is in," Javert announced.

Why was he drawing this out so cruelly? Was it in vengeance for Valjean making him doubt his sanity by refusing to admit who he really was? He did not want to be arrested and so he was hardly going to urge Javert to arrest him faster but this uncomfortable in-between, not quite free and yet not quite chained, was not a good feeling either.

"It is?" Valjean asked blandly.

"I was right," Javert continued, looking more pleased with himself than Valjean had ever seen him.

Of course he was. He had known from the very first on some level, hadn't he? That's why Javert had never trusted him and they had never warmed up to each other.

"Yes, you were," Valjean conceded.

"There was evidently some sort of disturbance that complicated matters but in the end Valjean was convicted and he is being sent back to Toulon," Javert continued. "The prosecutor is talking of charging him for the theft of that child right before he disappeared all those years ago but there really is no need since he will be a green cap now."

Valjean started. "I…what?"

Javert frowned, puzzled. "You said that you knew I was right and now you're surprised to hear what I was right about? What did you think I was talking about?"

"I…don't know," Valjean lied, shaking his head. "I'm just tired. I went out of town, you see, and have not had much opportunity to rest. And Fantine is doing so poorly, as well. You say there was a disturbance?"

Javert nodded. "Yes, although the messenger was not clear on what. He just said that the disturbance ended up making the trial take longer but that in the end the verdict was still what it was always going to be."

Valjean honestly was not sure what those words made him feel. Was it relief that his life here was not going to be shattered? Was it joy that he could continue to help the people of Montreuil and Fantine and her child specifically? Was it frustration that everything he had gone through to make it to the court in time and all of his agony had ultimately been for nothing? Was it horror at the fate of Champmathieu? Guilt that an innocent – more or less – was condemned to a lifetime of hell in his place? Perhaps it was all of these.

But mostly it was confusion.

How had the jury just ignored his confession like that when he had offered proof? When Brevet, Chenildieu, and Cochepaille had all recognized him before he left? When he saw in the eyes of those present that they accepted the truth? How had the president and the prosecutor allowed that? How had the defense attorney who, even if he had not believed Valjean's tale, would be a fool not to introduce it as doubt to free his own client?

"So there is nothing further to be done," Valjean said quietly. "Champmathieu will never leave prison."

"There is nothing in this world that could change that now," Javert confirmed. "Monsieur le maire, you do not seem pleased by this news."

Valjean wasn't. Even if he could not bring himself to completely regret that he had not succeeded in destroying this life that he had built (and it was through no fault of his own since he did not see what else he could have possibly done to make them see the truth), he rather wished that Champmathieu could have been judged on his own merits and not on Valjean's.

"He stole some apples," he said simply.

"It's part of a pattern of convict behavior," Javert disagreed. "And let us not forget that child he stole from eight years ago. And though it was never reported, I believe that he stole from a bishop as well. What hope is there for a man who would steal from a bishop? And by all accounts the Bishop of Digne was a particularly fine example of a bishop."

"That he was," Valjean agreed. "I hear your words, Javert, but I still do not like it. Man can change but no one was willing to give Champmathieu a chance. The minute they heard the words 'Jean Valjean' they made up their minds and would not be swayed by anything. That is a shameful thing."

"Maybe 'Jean Valjean' is all that they needed to hear," Javert suggested. "You are too softhearted, Monsieur Madeleine. You clearly have never seen any of this up close the way I have. A man like Jean Valjean will not, cannot change. Nineteen years in Toulon…the last time I saw him in the prison he was more beast than man and truly a dangerous man. And now he can play the fool so well that his mask never dropped, not even for a second. If any of us had allowed any doubt…Well, perhaps his performance would have inspired such doubt. He is just as dangerous as ever and he has plainly rejected whatever second chance society has seen fit to grant him. Even you cannot expect more of men than the chance Valjean was given."

"Oh, what chance is a convict ever given?" Valjean asked, almost to himself. "But I see that we will not agree and it seems like there is no longer anything that can be done about it in any event."

"No," Javert said, his eyes brightening. "We have closed the book on Jean Valjean and I can rest easier knowing that one more dangerous convict is back where he belongs."

Valjean nodded and rapidly adjusted his plans. He should really have fetched Cosette two months ago but he had been loath to leave Fantine. And maybe he wouldn't have to.

"Javert, I would ask a favor of you," Valjean said slowly.

Javert straightened. "If it is within my power to do so, I will do it. I remain in your debt for retaining my position after I falsely denounced you to the authorities."

Valjean looked at him sadly. He wished Javert would not blame himself for nothing more than being right and he wished even more that, since he apparently could not save Champmathieu anyway, Javert had never told him any of this. But that wasn't Javert's character, was it? He was so harsh on everybody else but he was just as harsh on himself and that was what made such severity tolerable. And, quite unexpectedly, Valjean no longer had anything to fear from him.

"Fantine's child, Cosette, is being held by innkeepers in Montfermeil," Valjean reported. "Money has been sent with instructions to send the child but they have so far refused to comply. I believe that they are taking advantage of the situation and are trying to get as much money as they can since they have, as of yet, refused to just outright name how much Fantine owes. I cannot leave Montreuil right now but I need to have the situation looked into."

Javert nodded. "I will go there presently, Monsieur Madeleine. I have business to attend to in the area as it is."

"Thank you, Javert," Valjean said, surprised to find that he truly meant it. He had somehow come to a place where he could thank one of the men who had held power over him at Toulon and had done his best to expose him here in Montreuil and mean it.

Javert saluted him and then turned to go.

Valjean returned to Fantine's bedside.

She looked hopefully up at him. "Cosette?"

Valjean did not know if Fantine would recover. The doctors were not optimistic though believing she would see Cosette had done her good so it stood to reason that Cosette actually being present would do more good. One thing was for sure, though. She would live to see Cosette returned to her. Javert was on the case and his unrelenting determination would be put to Valjean's use for once instead of his detriment. He would see it done and heaven help the Thénardiers if they tried to prevent him from doing his duty and paying back the debt he believed that he owed.

Valjean smiled at Fantine again and this time it was genuine. "Soon, Fantine."


	2. Chapter 2

Valjean didn't want to seem too eager to know why his confession had been completely ignored. He believed Javert when he said that, even if someone else was revealed to be Jean Valjean, nothing would induce the authorities to release poor Champmathieu. Valjean had tried his best but once that green cap had been placed on the fake Valjean's head, he had been lost. It was one thing to sacrifice himself and Fantine and Cosette and all of Montreuil to save an innocent man but to do so to attain nothing? It was unthinkable.

As such, he did not ask Javert if he had learned anything more before he left for Montfermeil and he would not ask after the man returned.

Instead, he waited for that man that he had vaguely recognized as being from Montreuil to return from Arras. This unknown man had been a member of the jury, he believed, so he would be an excellent source as to what had gone wrong with an otherwise straightforward confession. As Valjean had been in quite the hurry to settle his affairs before Javert came to arrest him and the juror was not, it took him a full two days longer than it had taken Valjean to return.

Valjean, having been informed when the juror had returned to town, was waiting for him outside of his house. A few discrete inquiries revealed to him that this was a Monsieur Bamatabois.

Bamatabois smirked when he saw Valjean. "I was wondering if you'd be here. You have questions, I presume?"

Valjean nodded. "Many."

"Well, Monsieur Madeleine, perhaps we should not have this conversation outside," Bamatabois suggested. He unlocked his door and then held it open in invitation.

"Thank you," Valjean said automatically as he entered the dwelling.

Bamatabois' servants must have also been alerted to his arrival as a fire was made up and there was a bottle of brandy on a small table by the chairs in front of the fire. Bamatabois gestured him him to take a seat before sitting himself and offering Valjean the bottle.

Valjean shook his head, not wishing to prolong this uncomfortable but necessary experience.

Bamatabois shrugged before pouring himself a generous portion. "If you're sure."

Valjean got right to the point. "I had not expected to receive the news that Jean Valjean was sent back to Toulon."

Bamatabois somehow managed to smirk again and simultaneously look extremely annoyed. "No, after that little stunt you pulled, I don't doubt it."

"I confessed. That should have been enough," Valjean said quietly.

The annoyed look grew more pronounced. "It almost was. We were about to be sent to deliberation when you saw fit to interrupt and when anyone recovered their presence of mind – which took awhile, let me tell you – we were sent to do just that. Everyone expected that we would acquit and then the court would surely issue an arrest warrant for you."

"Why didn't that happen?" Valjean pressed, wishing once again that people would get to the point and not drag out important information that he needed to know. Javert, at least, had not known just how desperate Valjean was to hear what had happened but he rather suspected that this man was doing it on purpose.

"The other jurors didn't even want to deliberate; they just wanted to vote straight off," Bamatabois said disgustedly, shaking his head. "You have no idea the difficulty I had dissuading them."

Valjean's eyes widened. "You changed their minds? But I confessed!"

Bamatabois looked faintly proud. "I didn't say it was easy but you offered no proof and no one wanted to believe you."

"I proved that I knew the convict witnesses," Valjean argued.

"Only that tattoo was undisputable. The rest could have just been something the convicts made up to destroy an upstanding citizen like yourself," Bamatabois countered, nearly crushing Valjean with the irony. "As for the tattoo, that's something any number of people would know about and you could have easily discovered without necessarily being a member of his chain-gang."

Valjean frowned. "If I were not Valjean, why would I claim that I was?"

"If you were him, why would you admit it?" Bamatabois retorted archly.

"It would have been against the dictates of my conscience not to."

Bamatabois laughed. "A convict with a conscience? You won't find many people who believe in that."

"Do you?" Valjean asked.

"Do I what?" Bamatabois asked. "Believe that convicts can have a conscience or that you are a convict?"

Valjean considered. "Both, I suppose, though the latter is of more interest to me."

"I'm sure I have no idea as to the former and I convinced several of my peers that the answer to the latter was 'no'," Bamatabois said drolly.

"And that didn't sound like a 'no'," Valjean noted, not entirely sure what to make of this young man who had saved him despite himself and given him the out he had so desperately been hoping for but wouldn't allow himself to take.

Bamatabois gave him a considering look for a moment before abruptly laughing again. "To be frank, Monsieur, I really couldn't care less if you were. Do I believe you are? I have no idea."

Now Valjean was astonished. "I have only met one other with that view and you do not much resemble him."

"What I do know is that this town needs you," Bamatabois said calmly. "And as long as that's true, I do not wish to see you leave."

Valjean bowed his head. "I know that, I do. But Champmathieu…"

"I make it a point to only put one person above thousands if that one person is me," Bamatabois said indifferently. "And what's done is done. No one could possibly blame you if you are Valjean – if they were being at all fair, that is – and my conscience is clear."

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It had not taken long for Javert to conclude his business near Montfermeil. The business was not pressing but it did need to be done and it was only practical to do so while he was in the area. He decided to accomplish this first so he did not have to take a child with him while he completed his duties.

He wondered if this would be enough to discharge his debt to the mayor. He did not feel that fetching the child of a prostitute that Madeleine was so absurdly tolerant of would justify his being allowed to keep his job, his life's purpose. But then again, having denounced Madeleine to the Prefecture, was there anything that would have made up for it? When he thought of what might have happened if not for the real Jean Valjean…He doubted that it would have happened as he had an unshakable faith in the law but it was certainly within the realm of possibility.

Javert did not approve of this inn that Fantine's daughter was residing in, this Sergeant at Waterloo. The name indicated that the man may be a Bonapartist or even a republican and thus potentially a troublemaker. The man was small and sickly-looking but, in actually, seemed to be perfectly healthy. Perhaps his strange appearance was not his own fault, exactly, but Javert did not trust such blatant dishonesty. The Madame Thénardier was large and disconcerting. He understood intellectually that she was a woman but could not quite make himself believe it. If a woman was so misfortunate as to have a beard, he could not understand why she did not just remove it in the way a man would. Yes, it would be very odd but significantly less so than remaining bearded.

Javert did not want to waste time but he also saw the value in observing the place before revealing his intentions and causing the Thénardiers to conceal any wrongdoing in the matter of Cosette. Madeleine had suspected that they were cheating Fantine and If that were the case then it was imperative that they not be rewarded for it. Over the past few months, it had not just been Fantine who was being cheated but Javert's direct superior and so he was duty-bound to put a stop to it.

He was offered a midday meal and he accepted the most economical option. Because of his police business that he had already taken care of, this trip was being paid for by the government and he would not spend any more of their money than was strictly necessary.

Though he watched diligently for nearly an hour and the inn was quite crowded, he did not manage to spot any obvious – what was obvious to him was not always obvious to other people less vigilant – sign of wrongdoing.

Thénardier, like any malefactor who wishes to survive unencumbered by the police, had a sixth sense about those who would have the power to make things incredibly unpleasant for him. Though Javert had not identified himself, Thénardier was nearly positive that he was a member of the authorities and thus not only was he not to be cheated but any less-than-legal business practices had to be suspended for the duration of Javert's stay, which he rather hoped would not be very long.

There were two healthy and happy little girls in the corner of the room playing together and one miserable wretch who had been sweeping the floor when he had come in but had quickly been shooed into the kitchen. There was also a smaller child that he had not seen but had cried at one point and Thénardier, casting a pointed look at Javert, dispatched his wife to see to. The girls all appeared about the same age and so there was a good chance that one of them was Cosette.

As two of them were clearly well-treated and one of them was not and as Fantine had apparently fallen into a great deal of debt after losing her job and then becoming too ill to even work as a prostitute, Javert could guess which was Fantine's child.

After he had finished eating, he caught Thénardier's eye and the man quickly came over.

"Is Monsieur leaving already?" Thénardier asked, making only a half-hearted effort to sound like he wasn't fervently hoping for the answer to be 'yes.'

"Regrettably, I must," Javert replied, nodding. "What is the bill?"

"Just six sous for the meal," Thénardier replied.

That was entirely reasonable and so Javert willing parted with the money. "There is one other matter."

"Yes?" Thénardier asked, disappointed.

Javert took the letter from Fantine out of his pocket and passed it over to the other man. "I am here to reclaim Cosette for her mother."

Thénardier eyed the letter thoughtfully. "Ah. Well, we always knew that darling Cosette was not to stay with us forever. My dear, will you fetch her?"

Madame Thénardier nodded and went into the kitchen.

Thénardier looked a little embarrassed. "It is always so gauche to speak of money but my family is not a wealthy one, Monsieur, and my inn does not get as much business as it should in a town such as this. Perhaps if I were in Paris…But I am not. We have done everything we could for Cosette, treated her as one of our own as we awaited the day that her poor mother was able to get her life to a place where she could take darling Cosette back."

Javert said nothing.

Not deterred, Thénardier continued, "Unfortunately, as you may be aware, her mother has fallen behind on her payments of late. It's not her fault, I'm certain that it isn't, but times are hard and her daughter has been so sick…I'm afraid that I cannot release her to you until Fantine's debts are cleared."

Monsieur Madeleine had given him three thousand francs to settle any possible debt of Fantine's. Javert had protested that it was far too much (Cosette had been left with an in-keeper not at an expensive convent) and Madeleine had agreed but he wanted Javert to take it just in case. The Thénardier had refused to produce the child before and he wanted there to be literally nothing standing between Javert and finally taking her with him. It almost embarrassed Javert to be so trusted not to pocket the mayor's money after the way he had betrayed him earlier but he had agreed in the end.

Javert took out another note, this one written by himself after getting the record of financial transactions between Fantine and Madeleine and Thénardier. "In January, Fantine owed you one hundred and twenty francs. In February, you demanded eight hundred in an installment of five hundred and then three hundred. You wanted three hundred this month. That is twelve hundred and twenty francs in just three months and I can only imagine what the charges were before January."

It would seem that even without losing her job, Fantine would not have been able to pay the Thénardier and would have been forced to take Cosette back (which in turn would have likely led to her losing her job unless Madeleine noticed and intervened). Javert was beginning to see why a weak soul such as Fantine had chosen prostitution. Though it was a flaw in Fantine's own character, it could not be denied that the exorbitant demands of these people had contributed to the matter and aided in placing her in a situation (only aided as she had had the child herself) where such a moral defect would be exposed.

Thénardier coughed awkwardly. "Yes, well, I understand how just looking at it like that, the sum total, would make you wonder. I have a documented list of expenses, however, that I've dutifully recorded and that I've sent to Fantine with each request of money. There was the need for warmer clothes for Cosette and then there was that terrible outbreak awhile back and-"

"I am not here to dispute the money that you already paid," Javert said flatly, though he did wonder why Madeleine had so blindly consented to just paying the money and not forcing them to hand over Cosette before now. Perhaps that was what being wealthy did to you, destroyed your understanding of money and so even these outlandish charges did not appear suspicious to him.

Javert, having never been rich, was not entirely convinced that it was possible to spend more than one thousand francs on one individual, never mind a child. Madame Thénardier emerged from the kitchen just then with the miserable girl from earlier and Javert had to wonder if even a hundred had been spent on her. And the most ridiculous part of this whole situation was that the Thénardiers had agreed to take her on for fifteen francs a month which was only forty-five in the three months in question.

"That is good," Thénardier said, relieved.

"I am not, however, prepared to pay you a single sou more," Javert informed him.

Thénardier looked regretful and Madame Thénardier's arms tightened around the child, who looked confused and a little fearful.

"Then, and I am truly sorry because what sort of a man would wish to see a child separated from her mother, I am afraid that I will not be able to let you leave with Cosette," Thénardier said, his voice dripping with false regret.

How they could pretend that this ragged child meant anything to them when they clearly could and did treat other children better was beyond him. It was also a little insulting that they expected him to either believe or pretend to believe this farce.

"You will release the child to me immediately or I will arrest you right now for unlawful detainment and we will take a much closer look at all of that debt Fantine somehow managed to accrue," Javert said calmly.

Thénardier paled and he gestured immediately to his wife.

She released Cosette and gave her a push towards Javert.

Cosette stumbled forward a few steps before stopping and looking around uncertainly.

With reluctance, Javert addressed himself to the child. "Your mother sent me to retrieve you." Mentioning Madeleine's involvement would just confuse her and possibly cause the greed of the Thénardiers to overwhelm their instincts to not anger the law although it really was demeaning to claim to be acting for Fantine when she really should have been jailed months ago.

Cosette just blinked at that.

"Come with me," Javert tried again.

Cosette turned to look questioningly at the Madame Thénardier.

It was her husband who answered, however. "Yes, yes, dear Cosette, pack your things as this man is taking you away."

Cosette walked at a normal speed out of sight but she returned with a few things bundled up suspiciously quickly.

Javert nodded to the Thénardiers before turning and leaving, barely pausing to check that Cosette was actually following him.

Though he had seen nothing technically unlawful – and he had been very watchful – Javert could not rid himself of the feeling that something underhanded was going on here. He resolved to report the matter to the local police before heading back to his post in Montreuil.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cosette had fortunately fallen asleep shortly after they had gotten into the fiacre but now she was awake and doing nothing but staring at him and Javert honestly did not know what to do.

He had no paperwork to fill out, he was not tired, and he had already finished the book he could not read in a fiacre because it made him slightly ill. He could not look at Cosette but he could still feel her eyes on him. They would arrive at Montreuil within a few hours but it could not come soon enough. He could not escape this girl until then and it was like she was deliberately attempting to make him uncomfortable.

After valiantly ignoring her for far longer than a reasonable person should have to, he finally gave in. "Yes?"

"Are we really going to see my mother?" Cosette asked. It was the first time he had heard her speak and her voice was a little hoarse.

"I only lie when it is necessary in the course of my duties as a police inspector," Javert said crisply. "Deceiving young girls about their mothers does not fall under that purview."

"I didn't know that I even had a mother," Cosette said wonderingly.

"Everyone has a mother," Javert said shortly. It was a matter of pure biology.

"I never did," Cosette disagreed. "Madame always said that it was because of how useless I was."

"Well she was wrong," Javert said, not so much to comfort the child but because what had been said was inaccurate.

"Is she pretty?" was Cosette's next question. It seemed that once she started she just couldn't stop. "I remember a pretty woman who was nice to me but I don't know who she is."

Javert thought of the woman lying in the bed, her hair shorn off and her teeth missing, barely aware of what was going on. A prostitute.

"That was probably your mother," Javert replied.

"Does she love me?" Cosette asked in a smaller voice, as if she were afraid to hear the answer.

"She had the mayor of our town send me to bring you to her and she gave the Thénardiers entirely too much money to take care of you," Javert replied.

Cosette nodded gravely. "Am I going to have to go back?"

That, Javert felt comfortable enough to answer directly. "No, you won't. Monsieur Madeleine will never allow it."


	3. Chapter 3

Valjean watched as Javert left the fiacre and hoped that little Cosette was in there as well. The Thénardiers had shown no sign of being willing to let the child go but Valjean had faith in Javert's unyielding pursuit of what he saw as his duty. Javert made no move to help anyone down from the fiacre but Valjean could see movement from within it so he moved to help her down instead.

A flash of surprise crossed the child's face but she did not seem alarmed, taking his hand and allowing him to help her to the ground.

Valjean's first reaction, honestly, was one of horror. It wasn't her fault, of course it wasn't, and he made sure to not show any outward sign of what he was feeling. It was just that Fantine had worked so hard and suffered so much. She had sold everything she had, from her teeth to her virtue, because she had believed that Cosette was sick and needed money. She was lying dying in the hospital at this very moment because she had denied herself everything to take care of Cosette.

He could very easily believe that this little girl was ill but he could not see that she had received any of her mother's money.

Cosette was extremely dirty and dressed in rags. Those were mere superficial problems and could and would be fixed before she went to see Fantine. That wasn't all, though. Her hands were covered with chilblains, she was too thin, and there was a fearful air about her.

Cosette was an ugly child. That did not bother Valjean, specifically, but he was disturbed by the clear cause of that ugliness which was that she was not happy and had been mistreated. It would kill Fantine to see it. He could only hope that he could mitigate the signs of suffering and that poor woman would be so caught up with joy at seeing Cosette again at all that she would be able to bear it.

He smiled kindly at Cosette and her eyes, formerly dull and uncertain, brightened a little. That was a good sign.

He turned to Javert and drew him off to the side. "How much did you need to spend?"

"I gave those people nothing," Javert said with a great air of satisfaction.

Valjean blinked. "Nothing at all?"

"When one has the law on one's side, extortion is no true threat," Javert explained nobly.

It would be nice to have the law on your side. Despite his position and newfound safety paid for with the blood and sweat of Champmathieu, Valjean had never fallen into the trap of believing that it was.

"I am very pleased with how well you have executed your duty, Javert," Valjean told him, well-aware that the other man would not just accept thanks like a normal person.

Javert nodded before reaching into his pocket and pulling out the money that Valjean had given him to secure Cosette's freedom. "I need to return this to you."

"You can return it to me later," Valjean said, not really wanting to carry that much money with him when he needed to go and take care of Cosette before bringing her to the hospital. He didn't fear robbery, by any means, and certainly not hear in Montreuil but it was inconvenient.

Javert did not lower his arm. "I would prefer to settle this now, Monsieur."

He would not easily be deterred and he had just done Valjean a huge favor, no matter that he believed he owed a debt for recognizing Valjean, and so Valjean accepted the proffered money. "Thank you, Javert."

As he had predicted, Javert merely nodded curtly and did not verbally acknowledge the words. He was still waiting.

"You may return to your post," Valjean told him.

Javert saluted and walked off. He hadn't glanced at Cosette once.

She was looking at him, anyway. "Are we really going to see my mother?" she asked, quietly. Her voice was hoarse and easily explainable to Fantine as the remnant of an illness but Valjean decided that she should drink some water anyway. She looked like she rather doubted that the answer was yes.

He nodded at her and her expression didn't change so he knelt down beside her. "We are, Cosette. We just need to clean you up first and get you something different to wear."

"Why?" Cosette asked innocently, looking down at herself.

Valjean wasn't quite sure what to say but he had to give her something. "The hospital has rules about visiting."

Cosette nodded, accepting that.

"Come with me," Valjean told her. "I will see to it that you are cleaned and properly clothed. Are you hungry? I can get you food, too."

Slowly, Cosette nodded.

Valjean took her through town. He was not happy that whispers and stares followed them everywhere but he knew what a strange sight it was, a ragged little child and their dignified mayor. He was sure that some people made the connection between the girl and Fantine's daughter, though he had not shared his intentions, and soon everyone would know. It would save him having to explain, at least, even if he doubted that many would understand even once they had all the facts.

Cosette stayed very close to him and her eyes darted everywhere apprehensively. Every now and then, when her anxiety reached a certain point, she glanced up at him and brushed against him before turning her attention back to the world around them.

She was looking at everything new she saw with at least some degree of fear. She had not shown any fear of Javert but she had been in his presence for more than a day and the only reason anyone ever had to fear Javert was if they knew that they had broken a law and not even Javert would imprison a child. It was distressing to see her so afraid of everything and yet…

She had not cast a fearful glance his way, not once. She was even drawing comfort in his presence when faced with her fear of everything else. He had only just met this child but he was…glad, he supposed, for her trust.

It was a strange feeling. He tried to remember if he had ever been trusted so implicitly before. He certainly hadn't been trusted in prison or his first few days as an honest parolee and if he had been trusted in his youth then it was one of those things that had faded away far past the point where he could retrieve it. There had been the gendarme who had not needed to see his papers but that had been a way of thanking him for the resuce of his children. It had taken him years before he had won the trust of the town and even that did not count because they trusted in their honorable mayor. He had not even been trusted to denounce himself correctly!

Perhaps the bishop had trusted him but since he looked at Valjean the exact same way before and after being dragged before him again for stealing the silver, he rather thought that that was more faith than trust.

And now this little girl, this child who he doubted had even been told he was the mayor or anything about him at all, trusted him to keep her safe from whatever it was that she was fearing. He didn't understand, couldn't imagine being so unsuspicious. Children were weak and vulnerable things, however, so perhaps they could not afford to be suspicious even when they were the easiest to take advantage of.

Cosette's time of being taken advantage of was over, he told himself. She was here with her mother and he would make sure that she was no longer a victim.

The owner of the store they went into was undeniably curious but, to his credit, held his tongue and merely helped Valjean find something appropriate for little Cosette to wear. He actually bought three outfits because he knew that Cosette had nothing else and who knew when she would have another opportunity to receive clothes? He bought her gloves to keep her hands warm and also to try and hide the chilblains from her mother. Hopefully she would not find it odd and demand to know what was being hidden from her.

Then Valjean took Cosette to his house and fed her lunch. She was fascinated by everything that she saw though his rooms were hardly well-furnished. Of course, everyone else in town had been equally fascinated at some point in time or another so perhaps that was not so surprising. She ate everything on her plate with no complaints. It was upsetting how she ate so quickly, however, almost as if she were afraid that if she did not finish her meal fast enough then someone would come and take it away from her. She was not afraid of him but the memory of being hungry remained within her.

He had seen that kind of behavior before.

After she was finished, he took her to the hospital where Sister Simplice bathed her and then dressed her in the most cheerful of the three outfits. One of the sets of clothing that Valjean had purchased was mourning colors. He hoped they would not be necessary for as long as Cosette would fit into them and he would not let Fantine see but it would not do to ignore reality in favor of what he wanted to happen.

Saving Cosette and then sending her to Fantine was a very good thing, certainly, but it would not atone for his failure to see Fantine's suffering (she who had once been one of his precious workers!) the way that saving Fantine would.

Cosette still did not look beautiful once she had been cleaned up, dressed in her new clothes, and had her hair nicely combed. It was easier to look at her without feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt. Looking at it objectively, Cosette's plight had not been his fault. Perhaps if Fantine had not been fired or he had not set up such strict moral requirement for his workers then the child might have been sent for earlier but what the Thénardiers had done was their own responsibility.

No, it was Fantine that he had destroyed and not Cosette and if he was feeling this guilty about the state of that child then he couldn't even begin to imagine how Fantine would feel since it was her unfortunate decision that had started all of this.

Valjean checked the clock right before he went in to see Fantine and found that it was only a few minutes before his usual time and yet Fantine was already waiting for him. He wasn't sure if she was well enough to still be able to keep track of time or if she was just always waiting for him and he was not brave enough to ask.

"I'm feeling much better now," Fantine said, heart-breaking as ever in her desperate determination to be good so that she would be allowed to see Cosette. "May I please see my daughter? I promise I won't get too excited."

As if she could help it when she was face-to-face with her daughter again. Valjean felt himself getting cautiously excited and not only was he barely even involved but anticipation was not a feeling he was well-familiar with.

Valjean nodded and, despite the seriousness of the situation, could not help but smile after watching the way Fantine positively glowed at the news.

"Cosette? Cosette, come to me!" she immediately called out.

Valjean turned and saw her standing uncertainly by the door. He gently took her gloved hand in his and led her to Fantine's bedside. She did not protest or pull her hand away which was another miracle.

Fantine stared at Cosette in some confusion. Valjean did not know what the child had looked like when the two had last been together but no matter how poor Fantine was, Cosette would have been much better cared for and more loved. He had also come to realize that Fantine, having not seen Cosette for so many of those crucial childhood years, continued to think of her child as the baby that she once was as opposed to the young girl that she must have intellectually known she now was.

"Mama?" Cosette asked, looking curiously down at the figure on the bed.

Fantine's expression cleared as she recognized her daughter and, to Valjean's relief, she smiled up at her and struggled to sit up a little taller. "Yes, Cosette!"

Cosette drew back automatically at the sight of her mother's too missing teeth but Valjean put an encouraging hand on her shoulder and she stepped forward again.

"I'm am so sorry that I left you for so long," Fantine said, tearing up but still smiling. "You have to believe that I never meant for our separation to be so long. Things just…did not work out."

Cosette nodded seriously. "You love me." It was almost a question but not quite.

"More than anything," Fantine promised her daughter.

Were those tears in Cosette's eyes?

Valjean felt like an intruder suddenly and so, with one last glance to make sure that Cosette would be fine in here on her own, he slipped into the hallway.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Javert had had difficulty finding time to seek out Bamatabois given his recent absences but it was important and so he made it a priority. No one had been able or willing to discuss what disturbance had almost upset the Valjean trial. Maybe it didn't matter since justice had still been served but this was a matter very dear to him, due to his knowing Valjean personally and his confusing of Madeleine with that wretched convict, so he felt almost compelled to find the answer. Bamatabois had actually been there and so he was the best person to ask because even if he did not wish to answer initially, Javert had plenty of time to try and convince him to change his mind.

Once Javert had the time, he also had to actually locate Bamatabois. Sheer chance led to him spying Bamatabois just entering the part of town where the prostitutes resided.

Javert was not approaching loudly but Bamatabois seemed to have a sense for these things and spun around, immediately spotting Javert. He smiled and went up to him.

"Javert! Good, as always, to see you keeping the streets safe," Bamatabois greeted him. "This is not what it looks like. Unless you think what it looks like is that I'm taking a short-cut home in which case it is exactly what it looks like. How very discerning of you."

Javert said nothing.

Bamatabois laughed. "Oh, you're quite right. It's obvious that that's what's going on. And I quite agree with you that it's dangerous to walk around here and I do risk exposing myself to all sorts of unpleasant sights but it is I risk I choose to take to save me some fifteen minutes on my walk."

"I need to talk to you about Arras," Javert informed him, not caring to comment on anything the man had previously said. It was obvious that either Bamatabois was telling the truth and was embarrassed by the very idea that someone might think a fine upstanding citizen like him was frequenting prostitutes or he was, in fact, frequenting prostitutes and was embarrassed by the very same thing. Javert was not paid to speculate even though he could not help but believe that one was significantly more likely than the other.

Bamatabois groaned. "Arras, Arras, will no one stop asking about Arras? It was not nearly as exciting as everyone made it out to be."

"Be that as it may, as a witness to the case I am rather invested in knowing what sort of complications almost derailed the course of justice," Javert said firmly.

Bamatabois seemed to hesitate before shrugging. "Ah, well, I'm sure you'd find out sooner or later anywhere. Monsieur le maire was in Arras as well and-"

"Monsieur Madeleine?" Javert asked, startled. "He did not say."

"Yes, well, that's hardly surprising considering what happened," Bamatabois reasoned. "Do let me finish, will you?"

Javert gestured for him to continue.

"He claimed to be Valjean," Bamatabois said simply.

Javert stared uncomprehending at a moment before the full weight of those words came crashing down on him. "He what? Why was I not made aware of this?"

Bamatabois shrugged. "It just didn't seem important."

Those words didn't make sense either and Javert doubted that any amount of time to process them would ever make them make sense. "Didn't seem important? How is it not important? Our mayor a convict…we'll be the laughingstock of Paris! Oh, what a lawless society we find ourselves in! This is appalling!"

Bamatabois blinked. "You're really going to hold up Montreuil, the town with the lowest crime rate in all of France, as the end result of a lawless society? And, furthermore, you're going to do so and expect people to see a lawless society as a bad thing?"

"The perils of a lawless society should be self-evident," Javert ground out. "But why am I wasting time, I have to go and-"

"You have to do nothing," Bamatabois interrupted.

"Ah, right, a lawless society is a good thing," Javert said sarcastically. "Forgive me, I am old and behind the times."

"Monsieur le maire is not a convict," Bamatabois told him.

"No, of course not, as a public figure the king himself holds in regard he's probably managed to get himself a pardon by now," Javert said, nodding even as he felt his brain shutting down.

"He's not Valjean," Bamatabois tried again.

"It's only sensible to change your name under these circumstances," Javert agreed.

"Javert!" Bamatabois cried out.

Javert paused in his contemplation of just how upside down the world had become for a moment. "What?"

"Jean Champmathieu Valjean was convicted and returned to jail," Bamatabois said pointedly. "This happened because our wonderful and definitely not a convict mayor was not Valjean."

"Of course not," Javert deadpanned. "Innocent people regularly confess to being notorious criminals bound for life in the galleys."

Bamatabois crossed his arms across his chest in a pale imitation of Javert's stance. "You know him better than I do, Inspector. Would Monsieur Madeleine confess to something he did not do to spare another, no matter how unworthy?"

The worst part was that he would, too.

And if the law said that Champmathieu was Valjean then that really was the end of it.

But he still had no idea what Madeleine was possibly thinking confessing such a thing (and maybe, possibly, not following through with it but he couldn't really believe that) and so there was only one thing to do and it was not a thing he was looking forward to.

He was going to have to have a conversation with his superior about his insane need to change a world that could never be changed.


	4. Chapter 4

Javert had presented himself at Madeleine's office and had been told that he was at the hospital despite the fact that it was not the mayor's customary time to be there.

As long as Madeleine was not neglecting his duty (and someone as wonderfully if sometimes misguidedly dutiful as him never would), it did not matter if he insisted on spending every waking moment at that woman's bedside or watching her child. It had not gotten that far, as of yet, but Javert sometimes worried. It was not often that he encountered someone so good that they needed some form of intervention and he was not entirely sure what to do.

The child Cosette was happily playing on the floor with a doll that was far too expensive. A gift from Madeleine, no doubt.

He would prefer not to be forced to engage in a conversation with her but it would be inefficient to go looking for the sisters to ask or for Madeleine himself. "Where is Monsieur le maire?"

Cosette picked up her doll and stood up. "He is with my mother. Shall I go and get him?"

Javert shook his head. If Madeleine was speaking to Fantine without Cosette than their conversation would be to the point and conclude soon enough. His business was not urgent and so it would not do to interrupt.

"Would you like to play with me?" Cosette asked suddenly.

Javert stared uncomprehendingly at her. "Play…with you?"

Cosette nodded and held up her doll. "Catherine and I want you to play with us." She changed her voice and started waving her doll around. "Oh, yes, please play with us!" What was she doing? Was the doll supposed to be speaking?

This might have been the strangest thing that anyone had ever said to him and, given his work and the uncover operations that went along with it, that was really saying something. What did he know of 'playing', especially with a doll and a small girl?

Cosette completely failed to pick up on his disinterest and was still looking at him expectantly.

"I don't have time to play with you," Javert finally gold her.

Cosette cocked her head. "No? But you are just standing here."

"I am waiting for Monsieur le maire," Javert reminded her.

She remained unconvinced. "Playing won't make him take longer but you'll have more fun."

He highly doubted that.

"Monsieur Madeleine plays with me," Cosette tried again.

"He is very generous with his time," Javert replied shortly.

Cosette seemed to give up at that but she resumed playing suspiciously loudly as if hoping to draw him in.

It did not work.

Eventually, after maybe a quarter of an hour, Madeleine emerged from Fantine's room.

Cosette lit up upon seeing him and Madeleine smiled in response.

"Your mother would like to see you, child," he said gently.

Cosette nodded and went in to see her and the mayor's eyes fell upon Javert.

"Javert!" he exclaimed in some surprise. Javert did not spend much time in such a place as this. "Is something the matter?"

"She wanted me to play with her," Javert replied unthinkingly. But he had asked what was wrong.

Madeleine's eyes were amused but he mercifully maintained a neutral expression. "Yes, Cosette does love to play with others. Her mother plays as much as she is able, though of course she is very ill, and I have obliged her on occasion."

More than 'on occasion' if the mayor playing with her was the first thing that came to the child's mind when trying to persuade Javert.

Madeleine sighed. "I only wish that she was more willing to play with children her own age but she seems to have had negative experience in that regard."

Javert felt that he could shed some light on the matter. "The Thénardiers had two daughters her age who were playing while she was not. They likely would not let her or at least their parents would not."

Madeleine looked sad. "I see. But you did not come here to discuss Cosette, surely."

Javert shook his head. "No. I wish to speak to you about the matter of Arras."

Madeleine did not move.

It was no surprise, really. Undoubtedly he realized that Javert had finally heard about his act of well-meaning idiocy. Hopefully by now Madeleine saw how foolish such an attempt was, no matter how noble his motives inevitably were.

He stayed silent, attempting to make the quiet so oppressive that Madeline would feel compelled to explain exactly what he was thinking. The mayor seemed content to simply stand there and never speak again, however, and so Javert was forced to continue.

"I told you that I had mistakenly believed that you were Jean Valjean but had been made aware of my error and the very next day you went to Valjean's trial and denounced yourself as that convict. You can understand my…concern."

"Is this your way of asking if I am Jean Valjean after all?" Madeleine asked softly.

Javert shook his head irritably. He had learned from his mistake and would not be baited into making yet another baseless accusation about the exact same subject. "Of course not."

Strangely, this did not seem to make Madeleine happy. "Why not?"

Was he trying to humiliate him? They had already discussed this and they had both been to the trial. "Because it is impossible."

"You did not think so once," Madeleine pressed.

"I was mistaken and I do not waste my time on pointless hypotheticals," Javert snapped.

"Indulge me, please," Madeleine requested.

Javert sighed. No doubt, beneath a healthy layer of disgust and repulsion at being confused for such a man, there was a hidden fascination at being thought capable of being so notorious. Civilians were all the same. "Monsieur le maire-"

"I have striven for many years to make myself the very antithesis of a convict and, for you to have thought otherwise, I must have failed somewhere along the line and I simply must know where," Madeleine said stubbornly. "Please, Javert. You are the only one I can ask."

That struck a chord within him. If someone had mistaken him for a convict while he was not posing as a criminal, he would need – not want, need – to know, too. Sometimes even while he was supposed to pass for a convict it disturbed him how successful he seemed to be at it.

"Very well," Javert agreed reluctantly. "I do not know how familiar you are with the prison systems." He paused but Madeleine did not give any indication. "I rarely saw a prisoner there with a sentence of five years or more who did not attempt to escape. Some especially villainous or impatient convicts tried to escape even if they had shorter sentences. Some of these escapes even succeeded although those were not many. It was fairly common to get out of Toulon, all of the prisoners help each other, but we found most of them in the end."

"It would not be difficult," Madeleine remarked, "for even if they found clothes to wear that did not scream of the galleys, there is still the shorn hair to contend with and – beyond that – I've found that time in the Galleys leaves its mark on a man."

Javert nodded. "You've undoubtedly seen convict processions. That is why the most successful escape attempts often are those from convicts who have been in prison for less than a year and several escapes happen at the same time. Though it is difficult to prove, it is widely believed that people from the outside assist them in their endeavor. Unfortunately, this means that it tends to be the worst criminals who succeed in escaping. While I would not have any criminal get away, it is more of a problem with the hardened career criminals than it would be for someone arrested for getting into a fight with the wrong people, for example."

"That does make sense," Madeleine agreed. "If you have so many attempts then you would need to be skilled at catching them and so only the professional criminals could prevail against you."

Javert nodded, accepting the implied compliment. "Though I am no longer at Toulon, I spent years tracking down the criminals who escaped. Some of them were quite cunning and more prepared than the usual rabble who thinks of nothing more than just getting out and so I have gotten into the habit of watching everyone carefully. You dragged your leg, Monsieur, and that is a common indicator of having once been in chains."

Madeleine looked down at his leg thoughtfully. "Is it?"

"But of course that is not the only reason one might have for dragging one's leg and so that was hardly conclusive," Javert continued. He wasn't sure why he was going into so much detail here. Maybe he wanted Madeleine to know that, for all that he had been wrong, he had had cause to believe as he had. It did not matter in the slightest or change what he had done and yet…

"Do go on," Madeleine instructed.

"Your unparalleled marksmanship did not add to the impression of you being a convict but it did make me think of Jean Valjean, since he was as skilled as you were and missing for several years," Javert went on. "There was the fact that you were in mourning for a Bishop that Valjean was last seen in the company of though the Bishop could have had nothing to do with any of this and, as Valjean had been arrested – if only briefly – from stealing from him I did not understand why you, if you were Valjean, would mourn. And while it is perfectly understandable why your papers were not examined when you first came to town, you never speak of your past and no one knows of it."

Madeleine looked distant. "I lost much and, try as I may, I do not seem able to regain any of it." Then, perhaps realizing what a strange statement that was for an extremely wealthy mayor to make, continued, "Not the things that really matter, at least. I was poor growing up and I was just a worker when I came here. It helps not to think of what you cannot change and, when you cannot avoid that, to merely refrain from speaking of it. I do not believe my past is public domain and the suffering contained there suitable fodder for their curiosity and their gossip."

Javert nodded in complete agreement. His superiors knew exactly where and what he had come from (it would have been wrong to deceive them) but he did not speak of it either and the common person had no need to know of something that might make them think that they did not have to obey the law that he represented. "Just the same, if I had known that you came from Paris, that you had four brothers, that they died and you were left alone, it would have assuaged my suspicions. No matter because they are assuaged now."

"You first brought the possibility of me being a convict, however obliquely, up to me when I was trying to save Fauchelevent," Madeleine prompted.

"Nothing nearly concrete enough to even begin to think of suggesting the possibility," Javert assured him. "Though I was doing what my duty in investigating the possibility. If you had been Valjean, your position would not have kept you safe from me."

"I do not doubt it," Madeleine said wryly. "But you spoke of him, of Valjean, to me before I even did anything more extraordinary than plead for someone to step up and save that man."

"That cart was the kind of object that I would have once said could not be lifted by a mere man," Javert explained. "In Toulon, I was proven wrong by Jean Valjean. It was his misfortune his strength was discovered as he was never taken off fatigue work in all his nineteen years. Of course, if he had stopped trying to escape he would not have been there so long, either. Because of the sheer improbability of a man being able to lift that cart and man's awareness of his own limits, the rest of the crowd could only stand by helplessly. And yet, somehow, you seemed to think that if you just offered up enough money then a miracle would occur and someone would be able to do it. You seemed to believe that it was possible and I thought it might be because, for you, it was possible. And I was right."

"And that made you think of Valjean because of how remarkable such a feat was," Madeleine concluded. "But Inspector, surely you know that if something is possible once then it is possible again. If Valjean is so strong as to lift the cart then that means that that strength is possible and any number of other men may possess it."

"I acknowledge that," Javert replied. "And that is why I still did not inform Paris."

"I do wonder that you seem to know so much about your Valjean," Madeleine said curiously. "I am fully aware of your dedication to the law and your years in Toulon but there must have been many prisoners under your guard there. Why does this one stay with you after all these years?"

Javert was surprised by the question. He had never thought to consider why it was that he kept seeing Valjean everywhere, even though years had passed. "Part of it was the strength," he said slowly. "You do not soon forget a man that can do the work of a jack. The constant escape attempts, which I have already mentioned took up a great deal of my time, was another factor. He got two years for resisting attempts to retake him on, I believe, his second attempt and I had actually been there for that. It was…quite memorable. We needed quite a few men to take him. He was perhaps the longest-serving convict there who was not a green cap. And once he broke parole less than a week after being reluctantly released, I was always going to be at least a little on the watch for him. I must apologize once again for thinking that you could have been him."

Madeleine sighed deeply as if the travesty that had been tormenting Javert since he had first learned the truth about Valjean now was merely a slight inconvenience just as soon swept aside and forgotten about. Life was so easy when you could be secure that you were righteous. "It no longer matters. I know the rest of this story. You were angry about my intervention regarding Fantine, informed Paris of your suspicions, and were pointed to Champmathieu."

"Who, despite your best efforts, has been correctly identified as Jean Valjean and returned to Toulon," Javert said pointedly.

Madeleine winced. "Ah, yes."

"I simply do not understand, Monsieur le maire," Javert said honestly. "I do not understand at all."

Madeleine looked entirely uncertain about where to begin. "Was there something specific that you did not understand?"

"All of it," Javert said bluntly. "So all of the specifics, as well. You have an unfortunate habit of believing in mercy over consequences but you do not generally try to subvert the course of justice. Falsely accusing yourself of being Valjean…You could hardly have shown less respect for the law than you did right then."

"I was not thinking of disrespecting the law, I can assure you," Madeline told him.

"Then what were you thinking of?" Javert challenged. He is this man's subordinate, he knows that, but he cannot let any man get away with abusing the law. Nothing came of the mayor's attempt and there would be no consequences but he had to try and make him see why such a thing could not be done.

Madeleine looked at a point somewhere above Javert's head. "I was thinking that I was sitting in that courtroom watching the trial for an entire hour. I was thinking that it was clear that the only reason that they thought of bringing up his potential criminal past was because they could not prove that he had anything to do with the apples. I was thinking that it was not just to condemn a man for being something instead of doing something. I was thinking that he did not deserve this and, yes, I was thinking that I wanted to spare him."

Where did he start?

"He was not condemned for being Jean Valjean," he insisted. "He was condemned because he stole those apples because without those he never would have been discovered. You say that he might not have stolen those apples. Maybe he did not, I do not know. It does not matter, though, because what he was guilty of was breaking parole and stealing from a child and robbing a bishop. Any of those offences would have been enough to see him returned to Toulon in chains for life and he committed all of them."

"I do not recall this supposed theft of a bishop being mentioned in court and I do not believe that the zealous prosecutor would have neglected to mention something so…scandalous," Madeleine said slowly.

"Well, it was not reported," Javert admitted. "And when gendarmes took Valjean to the bishop, he denied it."

"And that denial of being stolen from is not enough for you?" Madeleine demanded. "I thought you adhered to the rules of evidence, Javert."

"I do!" Javert retorted. "And even without that, the other two crimes can be proven. Valjean confessed to a priest of his theft right before vanishing! As for the first part…The Bishop, who was a saint and who is dead, excused his crime but it was probably just an act of charity: and I'm sure that you, Monsieur le maire would have done the same thing. This Bishop was a man just like you."

Javert had never seen Madeleine's face so open before but there it was, plain as day, a curious mixture of hope and regret, gratitude and disbelief, sorrow and reverence, pain and joy. But Madeleine had openly been in mourning for months after this same bishop had died and, the two being so similar and acquainted in the mayor's youth, had probably respected this man and had striven to be just like him. The reaction to his words made Javert, who was unused to such things, feel a little uncomfortable but his statement contained no flattery. In fact, he rather disapproved of the bishop's insistence on shielding Valjean from the natural results of his actions and he had been proven right as Valjean had gone right around to commit two more serious crimes before resurfacing a few weeks ago.

Were those tears he was seeing in the mayor's eyes? Javert could not be sure as, at the first suspicion, he immediately and respectfully turned his attention away.

Eventually, Madeleine cleared his throat and Javert refocused his gaze. "I thank you for your kind words, Javert."

"There is nothing kind or unkind in the truth," Javert said with certainty. "As I was saying, proving that he was Jean Valjean was merely so we could show that he deserved to be punished for crimes that we could prove he had committed."

"Did you ever think about why he might have broken parole?" Madeleine asked abruptly.

Javert had not. "I assume it was so that he could escape the watchful eye of the law. And indeed, he had eight years to live in anonymity."

"Have you considered that it was not just the law that refused to let him forget his past or try to move forward that he was trying to leave behind him?" Madeleine inquired.

"You will have to enlighten me," Javert replied. "It is my job to find out who committed a crime and to arrest them not figure out what drove them to it."

It looked like there were a lot of things that Madeleine wanted to say in response to that. He contented himself with ,"No, I suppose it is not."

Reluctantly, Javert asked, "What conclusions have you drawn, Monsieur le maire?" It would be something that portrayed those truant convicts as sympathetic, he was sure of it.

"Society," Madeleine said simply.

"Society?"

"It is not enough that they have to live their lives going where the law says to go and doing what it tells them to do and no matter how faithfully they obey these commands they are still the first ones looked to whenever something goes wrong," Madeleine began. "They also must show everyone that they meet that they were once a convict. I say 'once' but they always are, aren't they?"

"That I can agree with," Javert told him although he knew that they didn't mean it in the same way.

The look in his eyes made it clear that Madeleine had realized the same thing. "Who will hire a man who once stole? Who will sell them anything? Who will let him find food or lodging? Who will, if by some miracle he can find work, even give him enough to survive? Many laborers do not make enough as it is and if the convict earns still less…How is he to survive without turning back to crime? And so he lives up to – or rather, down to – the disdain and rejection that society has for him and just perpetuates the cycle as everyone was convinced that they were right to treat him that way in the first place. And the next convict they meet will have it even harder because they know they were right about the first one."

Javert shook his head, rejecting this. "That's too easy. Those poor convicts, they'd instantly reform and be saints if only society was nicer to them."

"Are you denying that the conditions that parolees face has anything to do with where they end up?" Madeleine demanded.

"If they did not have serious moral deficiencies in the first place then they would not let this negative treatment convince them to learn nothing from their years in prison – making those years wasted – and continue breaking the law," Javert said stubbornly.

"That doesn't answer the question," Madeleine argued. "If a man is born to rich parents who can take care of his every need then he will not steal to survive. If that same man is born into poverty then perhaps he will. Whatever deficiencies you believe that these convicts possess, circumstance simply must play a part even if you do not believe that it excuses is. If a man kills his wife's lover then if she had not had a lover it would have been impossible for him to have killed that other man."

"I…can see what you're saying," Javert conceded grudgingly. "Though I maintain that it does not excuse it. Still, we have to weigh the rights of the many against the rights of the few. The honest citizens of France have more of a right to know of any convict in their midst who might steal from them, kill them, commit any number of crimes against them than that convict does to pretend his past does not exist and start over."

"It was eight years after breaking parole before Champmathieu was arrested for anything," Madeleine pointed out. "Do you not believe that those eight years of living within the law – aside from the broken parole – and not even knowing for sure that he stole the apples indicates that he has changed?"

"What does it matter if he has changed?" Javert demanded.

Madeleine looked stricken. He was entirely too tender-hearted.

"If a man murders someone in cold-blood and then sincerely repents, does that mean that he should be allowed to escape the punishment of those acts?" Javert asked rhetorically. "He broke parole and he stole from that child as well as possibly that bishop. Those are crimes and they need to be punished regardless of if Valjean turned out to be just like you."

"If he has truly changed then he will already face punishment enough in the form of his guilt," Madeleine said quietly.

As if mere guilt could ever be punishment enough.

"And just because the first time Valjean was caught stealing was over the apples does not mean that it was the first crime committed since breaking parole," Javert reminded him.

"It just didn't seem right," Madeleine said simply, his gaze distant.

"That is not your determination to make any more than it is mine," Javert said seriously. "I understand how you might disagree with certain points of the law but it is the law and we are all charged with obeying it. What you did in Arras, Monsieur le maire, cannot happen again."

There was something almost painful about Madeleine's expression then. "Do not worry. It won't."

"You may disapprove of parts of the justice system but you do not have the right to place yourself above it," Javert lectured sternly. "No man does. That is what is so beautiful about the law. It judges all things equally, even if men occasionally err in enforcing it."

Was that a gleam of defiance? "I do not regret what I did."

"No, of course not," Javert said, shaking his head in frustration. How could someone as intelligent as Madeleine fail to grasp such basic concepts? He wondered what sort of monastery this man had escaped from before coming to Montreuil. "Nothing came of it and justice was still served so you can tell yourself that you won a moral victory and congratulate yourself, having no idea of the consequences you would have faced had your lie been believed."

"I was fully prepared for the consequences of being believed," Madeleine said flatly. "It had never occurred to me that I would not be."

"You clearly know nothing of the galleys," Javert said dismissively. "You may think that you are prepared for them because you have had some experience with convicts. You are not. Think about what it would really take to turn a man who looks like any other into the miserable wretch you see when they eventually run. Or try to, at least, because you will not be able to imagine it. You may have thought that you could handle being imprisoned in the galleys for life, Monsieur le maire, but you have no idea. The galleys is a terrible place reserved for the worst of our society. It is no place for an honest man and it is certainly no place for a truly righteous man like you."

Madeleine gave him an almost pitying look. "Oh, Javert…"

He was not sure what to make of that and so he ignored it. "I suppose that, for all your words otherwise, you must have great faith in the law to go there and denounce yourself as a criminal and trust that the wrong man would not be convicted but even I, with my utmost trust in the law, would hesitate before risking so much. The law is infallible but men are not and the case was decided by a jury." He chose not to mention that knowing that he would not be arrested as Valjean made what he did a hollow gesture because they had quite enough to be getting on with already. "And in addition to how foolish this was, it was such a selfish thing to do as well."

Madeleine started. "Selfish? In what way would sacrificing my liberty for the sake of another be selfish?"

"Your life is not just your own, Monsieur le maire," Javert replied. "You run a factory that employs a large part of this town. If you went to Toulon, what would happen to all of your workers? And you almost single-handedly pulled this town from an economic depression to the prosperous little hamlet we see today. You give and give so much that it is a wonder that you have anything left for yourself! This town has really come to depend on you. Now imagine that all of that went away suddenly."

Madeleine looked a little uncertain. Finally, progress. "I did consider that but they survived before me and, if they had to, they will survive after me. In fact, no one can live forever so sooner or later they will have to do exactly that and I can only hope that I will have done enough to ease things for them even after my death."

Javert was never more painfully aware of how ridiculous he must have sounded, accusing a man like this of being a common criminal.

"And they would not be consigned to the galleys, unlike Champmathieu, so I judged that his need was greater than the need of any of the other individuals. It was not easy but I could not in good conscience let him go to Toulon without at least trying to stop it," Madeleine revealed.

Javert still had one card to play to make him realize that he was being foolish. Even though he pledged not to do something like this again, what was really to stop him from feeling overly sorry for the next convict he heard about since he faced no consequences for this? He would have to take care in the future to not draw Madeleine's attention to any local court cases since the mayor showed a remarkable lack of interest in what went on outside of his little fiefdom.

"Though I still do not see why you concern yourselves with them, had you been arrested as Jean Valjean what of Fantine and Cosette?" Javert asked silkily.

Madeleine flinched and he knew he was on the right track.

"Fantine would have probably died by now without Cosette by her side since you were the only one with both the desire to fetch her and the means to do so," Javert pointed out. "And as for Cosette…you did not see where she was staying but you saw the state that she was in and that should be enough. It was not a good place for a child and she would not have had a good life there. Was trying to save a man from the consequences of his own bad choices worth letting them down?"

"Fantine…would not have been able to be saved and her death might have been accompanied by the despair of knowing that she would never see her daughter again," Madeleine said carefully. He took a deep breath and his eyes were suddenly blazing. "But as for Cosette…She would have been taken care of. I had made that vow before I ever heard of Champmathieu."

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how exactly Madeleine thought he was going to accomplish that from Toulon (they didn't give the convicts time to get their affairs in order!) but something about the look on his face stopped him. He was left uncertain that the mayor would not have been capable of escaping from Toulon and staying out of sight even while raising that woman's child. After all, since he would have committed no crime save perjury and Champmathieu would be out of danger, would reason would he have had to stay? Madeleine was a wiser man that Valjean, that was for sure, so with a similar strength and a keener intellect he might just have succeeded, too.

It was not something that he wanted to think about.

"I understand that it was not a practical thing to do and would have hurt far more people than it helped," Madeleine said in a low, measured voice. "I understand it would have ruined my life and prevented me from helping countless others in the future. I still believe that I did the right thing but I swear to you that nothing like this will happen in the future. It can't."

Javert wasn't sure if he'd gotten through to him or not. Perhaps he knew that Javert was right and was just clinging to what remained of his dignity by insisting that he had not made the wrong decision. As long as he was not planning on doing something like that again then his reasons did not matter so much.

Javert nodded. "I am relieved to hear that, Monsieur le maire. I understand that your philanthropy is your most treasured part of your life but I think that, your newfound resolution notwithstanding, we need to have a discussion about boundaries."

Madeleine's brow furrowed. "Boundaries? Javert, what you talking about?"

"Desiring to improve the world is an admirable thing," Javert said. "But sometimes such desires can go too far."

"You can never go too far in your desire to help another," Madeleine objected, his thoughts clearly elsewhere. "And even something that may seem like a big sacrifice to you may be worth far more than you can ever imagine to someone else. You might be saving a life with a little act of kindness."

"That is all well and good," Javert agreed. "And what you have is certainly yours to do with if you like. If you want to give everything you have to every ingrate who comes into your life then that choice is, of course, yours. But surely you must agree that when you get to the point where you're willing to spend the rest of your life in prison for something you did not do and nobody suspects you of doing to save a stranger then you're going too far."

A tinge of annoyance. "I already said that I would not do something like this in the future, Javert."

"Ah, but what does that mean?" Javert asked. "You won't try to get yourself imprisoned, yes, but if you do not accept that it is possible to give too much and you need to be sane about this then what's to stop you from, I don't know, giving every last bit of your money away and having nothing to live on so you die in the streets?"

"I think you're being a little dramatic," Madeleine told him.

"I really wish that I could be so sure of that," Javert replied. "But, back when I was trying to decide if you were Jean Valjean or not, I spent a great deal of time watching you."

"That must have been quite dull," Madeleine said lightly.

Javert shook his head. "Far from it. When Bamatabois told me that you had falsely confessed, at first I was surprised but after really thinking about it I no longer am. This is exactly the sort of overly self-sacrificing thing that you would do for no clear reason except that it seems the 'moral choice' – though by what definition of morality I could not tell you – and it really has to stop. If it does not then one of these days you will give until there is nothing left and end up wasting away alone because you care too much for those that matter to you to allow them anywhere near you."

Madeleine was looking at him curiously. "You sound disapproving, Javert, but surely that too is my choice."

"A man such as you," Javert said frankly, "one of those good and righteous men that remind me why I chose to upheld the law, you deserve better than that."

Madeleine's expression softened and Javert thought that maybe he had finally gotten through to him, at least in part. "I thank you for your concern, Javert. I will be fine."

Review Please!


	5. Chapter 5

Cosette was sitting on the edge of Fantine's bed and happily playing with her doll. She insisted that Valjean stay in there with them and Fantine had agreed so, despite his impulse to let the little family alone, he stayed in there with them. He was not sure what to make of it. It felt almost like…

Staying with Cosette meant being drawn into her games and, unlike a certain inspector he could mention, he was happy to oblige her. It took so little to make her smile.

"Catherine wants to play house," Cosette announced. "Mama can be the mama, you can be the papa, and I'll be the big sister."

Valjean glanced over at Fantine in concern. Assigning him that role in her life, even in a game, was dangerous and he expected Fantine to object.

Instead, she was smiling (her smile no longer frightened her daughter and this only made the smiles come easier) and coughed before saying, "I think that sounds lovely."

Slowly, Valjean nodded despite his unease.

"Catherine's feeling sick," Cosette informed them gravely. "She's the baby."

"How do we make her feel better, Cosette?" Fantine asked gently.

Cosette thought for a moment. "Catherine says that she needs everybody to hug her." She squeezed the doll tightly before passing it to her mother who not only obediently hugged her but smoothed the doll's hair back and kissed her on the cheek.

She passed Catherine to Valjean who took her hesitantly. He always felt a little ridiculous with that delicate doll in his hands and he could never completely shake the thought that he was going to break it. But Cosette was looking at him expectantly so he carefully enfolded the doll into a hug. He tried to pass it back to Cosette but she shook her head.

"Now you've got to sing to her so she'll feel better," she insisted.

Valjean blinked, feeling quite out of his element. When was the last time he had ever sung? Back in Toulon at some point though that was hardly what this child was looking for. Had he ever sung for his nieces and nephews? He could not remember. His sister had, certainly, but if he had ever known the words they had long since fled. And Cosette was still watching him.

Awkwardly, he cleared his throat. "Little Catherine, baby girl, feel better so that you may play with Cosette. She wants you well and so do we so sleep now and be healthy when you wake."

It wasn't much as far as songs went (that was probably generous) and his singing was far from perfect but it seemed to make Cosette happy.

She finally accepted the doll and grinned up at him. "You're a really good papa."

Again he looked to Fantine who appeared perfectly unperturbed.

He was in trouble.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Javert was on his nightly patrol when he took note of a disturbance near where the prostitutes gathered. That's where the trouble always was. Sometimes he wondered why he even bothered to patrol the other, safer areas of the town. It was necessary, he reminded himself, to keep the better parts of town as nice as they were.

He walked over there to find three livid prostitutes with mud down their dresses and Bamatabois quickly cutting off what he had been saying (something about whores). There was mud on his hands and he hastened to wipe his hands off on the dress of one of the prostitutes. She looked like she would dearly like to smack him but refrained. Javert spared a moment to consider what he would do if anyone short of the mayor dared to do such a thing to him.

He was glad of her self-control. If she gave him a reason to arrest her then past experiences had taught him that Madeleine would probably appear out of nowhere to whisk her off to the hospital and determine to save her from her poor life choices. And of course she would have a tragic story and a precious child that was being mistreated somewhere. Madeleine would insist on bringing it to town and taking care of it just like with Cosette.

Really, how could one uphold the law when forced to contend with such things? But it was relatively innocuous compared to some of Madeleine's other world-saving plots so he contended himself with sending off a silent prayer that she would not provoke an arrest and had not already done something that would impel him to arrest her.

He turned to Bamatabois first. "Dare I ask what happened?"

"There is no need to hesitate, dear Inspector," Bamatabois assured him, grinning brightly. "But we do have to stop meeting like this."

"My route is always the same, Monsieur," Javert said flatly. "Perhaps you should stop finding yourself in this part of town."

Bamatabois shrugged apologetically. "Oh, I would if I could but it is such a convenient shortcut so I'd hate to lose it."

"Not wanting to be inconvenienced isn't really the same as not being able to do something," Javert pointed out.

"It is in my life," Bamatabois insisted. "In fact, that's how I make all of my decisions."

"That sounds terribly irresponsible," Javert said, not surprised in the slightest.

Another shrug. "It seems to be working out for me."

"What happened?" Javert demanded.

"I was just walking home and I guess these prostitutes must have started throwing mud at themselves or something," Bamatabois said innocently. "I really don't know what happened because I was averting my eyes like a good Christian ought."

Was he even trying to convince him?

"Is that so?"

"Well, as I said, I was not really paying attention so you'll have to ask them," Bamatabois said, inclining his head towards those lovely ladies.

"Is this true?" Javert asked, turning towards them.

The three prostitutes glared daggers at Bamatabois, clearly blaming him for whatever had happened.

"It is, Monsieur Inspector," one of them said finally. "I do hope that we did not cause any problems for anyone."

"Really, I don't think there's any need to press charges," Bamatabois said magnanimously. "They're prostitutes. Their lives are bleak enough as it is. What right do we have, any of us, to make things worse for them?"

The man may be bringing it all entirely upon himself but he was still a citizen who hadn't done anything that Javert had witnessed or been told about to break the law and so Javert thought it only prudent to escort him home to make sure that he didn't push anyone over the edge and lying in a gutter bleeding out somewhere.

It proved to be a good choice as Bamatabois actually seemed to think it was a good idea to wink and wave at them as they left.

"Why is it," Javert said slowly as they walked along, "that I keep finding you in these sorts of situations?"

"I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific," Bamatabois told him. "What do you mean by 'these situations'? I don't really detect a pattern here."

"This is the second time I've come across you in the middle of something with a prostitute," Javert pointed out.

Bamatabois looked genuinely offended. "Javert! I will not have such slander against my character! I have certainly never been caught consorting with a prostitute!"

As far as he knew, the other man was correct. "I mean, involved in some sort of a dispute," Javert clarified.

"Oh," Bamatabois said, relaxing. "I know that your question was not actually a yes or no question but I'm going to have to answer with a 'no' anyway."

Javert suppressed a sigh with difficulty. "Do go on, Monsieur."

"You have only ever seen me anywhere near a prostitute twice (that other time it was implied that I was going to walk past some but you were gone by the time that that happened) and that's hardly a pattern of behavior!" Bamatabois objected.

"I shall have to wait until it happens often enough that I can categorize it as a pattern of behavior, then," Javert said, not looking forward to that in the slightest.

"I'm sure it won't," Bamatabois said breezily. "I was hardly in a dispute with those, ahem, 'lovely ladies' back there and the only reason I had any dispute with what's-her-name was because that vicious whore attacked me out of nowhere."

Javert nodded. "Do you know what became of her?"

Bamatabois frowned. "No, why?"

Javert answered that question with one of his own. "But you did hear about Monsieur le maire's newest charity case up at the hospital?"

Understanding dawned slowly in Bamatabois' eyes. "Did he really? Why?"

"I could not tell you," Javert said honestly.

"So you'll see that I'm quite right about his charity problem. But you were asking me why you continue to happen to walk by when I encounter prostitutes since this is such a rare and unwelcome occurrence." Bamatabois shrugged indifferently. "Perhaps because you always patrol around these areas and so when I find myself in these sorts of situations you're around to witness it?"

"And I've been a witness to each and every encounter," Javert said, unable to disguise the skepticism in his voice.

"Every encounter that I've had to acknowledge their presence," Bamatabois amended. "I don't know how that came to be but I am truly fortunate as it helps me know that I am safe."

"You would be much 'safer' staying away from here," Javert said pointedly.

Another shrug. "That may very well be, dear Inspector, but I am not the one who invited the prostitutes to take up along my favorite route home now am I?"

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Monsieur le maire, I cannot thank you enough for what you've done for me and, most importantly, my darling Cosette," Fantine said once again. She was always thanking him for his actions even though it was only through his blindness that she had come to grief in the first place. It was so difficult to hear her praise and sometimes, cynically, he wondered if she knew that and any lingering resentment even partially motivated her words. Fantine was too good for that, though, and too forgiving. Her biggest crime was that she loved too much and she was perhaps the most grateful person in France.

"It was nothing, Fantine," he said quietly.

"You always say that and it is always so far from the truth!" she exclaimed. "I had long ago abandoned any hope that I would live to see my beautiful little girl again and you have given her back to me and I will not ever forget it."

"You should never have been separated in the first place," Valjean said firmly.

Fantine smiled sadly. "No we should not have been but that is not your fault."

Valjean stiffened. "I did not say that it was."

"You did not have to," Fantine said wisely. She sighed. "And now, though I would do anything for this not to be so, my child and I are to be separated again and this time for much longer."

Valjean unthinkingly took her hand in his. "You will live, Fantine, you're going to live. It's too soon for you to say goodbye."

Fantine smiled at him before a fit of coughing overtook her and she squeezed his hand. "That is sweet. I wish your words could make it so but I am going to die."

"Cosette needs you," Valjean said, a little desperately.

Fantine's eyes darkened and her limp hand slipped from his. "I know that. Cosette is back and she is so beautiful and I am off the streets. I could die happy if not for the worry over what is to become of her after I am gone."

He did not want to believe that Fantine was truly dying but the doctors had warned him that it was only a matter of time since before he had ever heard of Champmathieu and perhaps her race truly was run. This was the happiest ending Fantine could get, dying so young in years but an old woman just the same. Cosette, though…With Cosette there was still a chance for real happiness, proper happiness. She just needed to be cared for and held up to the light once her mother was gone.

"I will make sure that she has everything she could ever need," he vowed.

So many people would not understand. They already did not see why he blamed himself for Fantine's plight since he had had nothing to do with firing her and she had known the rules about propriety before she had even been hired and if they could understand his point they would consider his duty quite discharged with Fantine's death. Most of them would not dare outright say anything, he knew, but Javert might.

Javert who had been watching him closer than ever now that he was finally completely convinced that he was not, in fact, Jean Valjean. It was rather disconcerting but at least this time the gaze had nothing to do with considering imprisoning him. No, since their discussion about Arras, Javert seemed to have come to the conclusion that Valjean's good works were a sign of some sort of sickness that he had and must be protected from.

When a drunken man had jumped through a window at a tavern right as Javert happened to be on patrol, the inspector had shot Valjean a look warning him to not even confess to doing this because no one was going to believe him.

It was…very strange. For so much of his life he had been assumed to be guilty of everything just by virtue of having once succumb to the temptation to put his family's survival over the law and now he couldn't get people to believe that he was guilty of the things that he had done and freely confessed to. He was not quite at the point where he was seriously considering blatantly committing a crime right in front of Javert to see if the man would believe him then (and stop looking at him like he needed to be saved from his own goodness) but the fact that he was thinking of it at all rather spoke for itself.

Fantine was looking at him now the way she had looked at Cosette for the first time in years, like she was fortunate enough to witness a miracle and knew exactly how precious that moment was. "I know that I have no right to ask for this and that you have done far more than anyone else would have dreamed of but this is for my Cosette and so I must ask it all the same."

"You may ask me anything," Valjean said gently, trying to set her at ease.

"I appreciate that you promised to make sure that Cosette wants for nothing. You owe neither of us anything and so paying for her to go to school or whatever you have planned is already exceedingly generous but…" Fantine hesitated before ploughing right ahead. "I want more for my daughter than to be alone in this world with only a distant benefactor to watch out for her."

Valjean had not actually taken the time to think about how he would fulfill his promise to take care of Cosette but he could understand why Fantine would worry. Soon, but hopefully not too soon, she would be beyond having a say in the matter and so she must exert what influence she could while she still breathed. "What do you want?"

A deep breath and Fantine was looking him straight in the eye. "My child never had a father. She has a loving mother but soon she will lose that, too. I want to give her what that man never would. I want you to raise her as your own." There was a stubborn fire burning in her eyes but it was not a hopeful one. She was right that it was a very tall order and one that most people would refuse on the spot.

He could never outright turn down anyone seeking his aid, though. He had never thought to have a child of his own. He had never thought to. When he was younger he had never had any time to do more than glance at pretty girls (what had he to offer them if he could have found the time?) and how could one have a child without a girl to be the mother? Then when his sister started having children he might as well have had them, too, since he was living with them at the time, especially when his brother-in-law had died. Seven small children he was supporting and he answered to 'Uncle Jean.'

Toulon was where dreams went to die and afterwards he had been too wary of allowing anyone close enough to get suspicious to even consider looking for someone. Javert did not even have to be allowed close before he started to suspect but then Javert was as much the law as he was the man. And now that he was truly and completely free (aside from whatever chains his mind could conjure up for him) he was so out of practice at looking at women that he did not even know if he could begin again. And how could he possibly take an innocent woman and bind her to him without telling her the truth of his past? How could he subject someone that he cared for enough to want to keep beside him to those horrors that still haunted him? How could he expect her to stay after that?

No, he had never thought that a child lay in his future but evidently Fantine did. Not a child of his blood but one that needed him just the same. No one else seemed to care, Fantine was quite right about that, and he could not stomach the thought that her sacrifice would end in anything less than the happiest of futures for Cosette.

Children need not be burdened with the sins of their fathers and so he would not have to feel guilty for concealing that from her and her life could only be improved by his presence. That was a novel feeling. He was well-used to the good that his money could do but that was hardly the same. It would be easier for her, too, if after her mother died she was still with one that she liked and trusted. And he did want to keep her in his life.

It was strange. He could swear that it had never crossed his mind to keep Cosette with him but it was as if a part of him had just taken it for granted that he would. He immediately felt a wave of guilt wash over him because he never would have been able to do so if Fantine had recovered.

"Are you certain, Fantine?"

She drew back, surprised that he was not fighting her on this. "Having you raise her is the next best thing to raising her myself and I am much more certain of your character than those who I last left her with."

There was nothing really to be said in response to that. She need not know even as much as Valjean knew about how the Thénardiers had betrayed her trust. "If it is what Cosette wishes then I will be a father to her."

"It will be," Fantine said, managing a small smile. "She loves you."

Did she really? He knew that she was fond of him, certainly but this…There was a strange warm feeling in his chest but he ignored it in favor of focusing on the dying woman before him. "If she says as much then there is nothing that will stop me from doing as you ask."

Fantine nods. "I'm glad that you feel that way because I want to make sure that this is perfectly legal and no one can challenge this. I know that you are an important man, Monsieur, but I am a mother and I have to be sure."

"What would you have me do?" Valjean asked.

"For the sake of my dear Cosette..." Fantine trailed off and then started again. "Please. Marry me."


	6. Chapter 6

Valjean was not entirely sure that he had heard her correctly.

She had just been thoroughly convinced that she was dying and suddenly she wished to enter into matrimony with him? He was…quite a bit older than she was even without all of those secrets he could never tell her or her child. She had never shown any interest in anything like that for as long as he had known her, either, and he knew that Cosette must not have known of this plan or the girl never could have kept quiet about it. Making such a spontaneous life-changing decision like that…was her fever back?

He aborted his movement to check (though he would have to do that now that that thought had occurred to him) because he realized just how insulting it would be to her, feverish or not, if he were to respond to her offer of marriage by assuming she was even more ill than she had been previously.

Fantine kept her eyes steady on his but he could see that it was a struggle for her to do so. "Monsieur le maire?"

He knew that he should say something but for the life of him he had no idea what. He had never expected to be in this sort of position. He had never had anyone to offer a woman and then for nineteen years there were no women at all. As the wealthiest man in the area and mayor, he had had a few speculative glances thrown his way but his habit of keeping to himself and declining most social invitations insured that nothing ever came of that.

And then…this. A marriage proposal from a dying woman's bedside. How did one go about handling things like this?

"I…" He trailed off, still undecided about how to respond. "I had not expected to hear such a request, Fantine."

Finally, she looked down. "Oh, I know how absurd it must seem to you. A prostitute and the mayor of the town! You are good not to laugh outright."

He had not even considered that. How could he? If people saw the prostitute and the convict they see them as well-matched and offer any spare pity they might have had to her for at least she was not a thief.

He took her hand in his and squeezed it, prompting her to look up at him, shame still burning her cheeks.

"That has nothing to do with anything," he said firmly. "People may talk; people do little else. You must know, Fantine, that I do not condemn you for the path that your life has taken."

That earned a rueful smile. "Then you would be the only one who did not. I only thank God that my dear Cosette does not know."

"She will never know," Valjean swore.

Fantine nodded her head in agreement. "She would be ashamed."

"She would be heartbroken at what the world has done to you and what you have had to do for her sake," Valjean corrected. "I do not condemn you, Fantine, because I know something of seeing no other options. You had a child, the father was nowhere to be seen, and you needed work. You cannot work with a small child to support so you left her with those with the time to watch her. When your child was discovered and you were fired then of course you needed to find something else to do. The Thénardiers kept demanding more money and you had to find a way to pay them. If there was no work to be had that could offer you the money you needed for your child and you were faced with letting her die or…doing what you did then how could you have done otherwise?"

"Most people would say that I should not have had a child in the first place if I were not married," Fantine said softly.

"Is one mistake worth the forfeiture of your life and any sort of happiness?" Valjean asked rhetorically. "I do not believe that that is so. And, having met Cosette, I cannot see her as a 'mistake.'"

There were tears in her eyes now. "Monsieur le maire, you are too good!"

The words felt like a blow. It had been his factory that had dismissed her because of his insistence of his workers having what he had seen as proper morals. He still felt that that was important, of course, but this poor woman (barely more than a girl) who had done everything to protect an innocent child…what was wrong with her morals? Society would look at her actions and disagree but he and the morals of society had been known to disagree.

"You will say no," Fantine predicted suddenly.

Valjean blinked, needing a moment to remember what it was she was speaking of. Ah, yes. She had wanted to marry him. "I was not aware that you felt that way about me," he said carefully.

She looked infinitely sadder. "It is not…I was in love once and it destroyed me. Years later it is killing me. I do not think that I have it in me to love again. Or maybe it is life that will not let me."

The words pulled at his heart; old sins cast long shadows. Her predicament now, however indirectly, did all stem from her once-love, hadn't it? And what of him? Did he even remember her, this woman whom he had destroyed?

"I know what you are thinking," she said, a gleam of defiance in her eye now. He very much doubted that. "You are thinking that I am cruel to ask that of you if I could not even love you. Well, you are so good and kind that had things been different I have no doubt that I could! But you would not be saddled with me for long. I am, as I said, dying. I…It won't be long now. I am certain of it."

"If you do not wish to marry me and do not even expect to live long enough to reap the benefits of such a union then why do you ask?" Valjean asked gently, trying to understand.

"I told you," Fantine said, her voice so quiet that he could barely make out the word. "My Cosette."

Understanding filled his eyes. "Fantine, I already promised you that I would be a father to her if she wished me to and, if she does not," the words hurt to say, "then I will still give her the best life that I can. You do not have to sacrifice anything else in order to provide for your daughter."

And it would be a sacrifice for her. She would have to lie before God when the priest asked if she would promise to love him and that was the very last thing she needed to be doing while so close to joining Him at last. Some people had little choice but to lie, though Valjean liked to believe that they at least tried, but Fantine had no need of that.

He had promised that Cosette would be looked after and he had meant it.

"I know and I did believe you, I just…" Fantine looked lost. "You are not a relative. What if they will not let you keep my child?"

"You can sign the papers giving her over to me," Valjean assured her. "I will have them drawn up as soon as I leave here. And even if we did not manage to do that, I am the mayor of this town. No one will tell me that I cannot raise an orphan child if that is my wish."

He grew uncomfortable with the sheer force of gratitude dawning on her face but stayed there all the same.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Somehow, despite the fact that he was pretty sure that they had been alone and he had not spoken of what had happened, Javert had found out about Fantine's proposal. As he had yet to cease acting like Valjean was the most gullible and naïve man in France, he had immediately assumed that there was going to be a wedding.

Valjean did not feel the need to quickly disabuse him of this notion.

"Monsieur le maire, be reasonable," Javert pleaded. "It is one thing to wish to help a prostitute and make sure her child is taken care of but actually marrying one? You cannot possible do this!"

"Why can I not?" Valjean asked rhetorically. "Neither of us are previously married and it would create a stable home environment for little Cosette. I have grown quite fond of her, you know, so raising her will be no burden at all."

"It is the fact that she has never been married that is precisely the problem!" Javert exclaimed. "And you! You are our mayor! You cannot be seen to be engaging in such depravity!"

"What is so depraved about getting married?" Valjean asked blankly. It was almost sweet. He who had seen and been submerged in the very worst that humanity had to offer for nineteen long years was now seen as needing to be protected from it by one of those men who had been duty-bound to keep him chained in that hell. But those days were behind him now, he was irrevocably free for better or for worse and he had nothing more to fear from the inspector who had only ever done his duty. "I would have thought that having a family of my own would make me more…relatable. It is perfectly normal for a man my age, if he has not already settled down, to seek out a wife."

"Well…yes," Javert conceded, flustered. "But not like this! You need a respectable woman, not a prostitute!"

"She has given that up," Valjean informed him. "What is more respectable than a penitent sinner?"

Javert looked like he was going to die of shock. "Why would you even consider this, even if you cannot see the multitude of reasons why this is the second-worst idea you've ever had?"

Well, it would seem that Javert still placed 'falsely' admitting to being himself as a worse decision. Personally Valjean thought that stealing that bread as he had or that first escape attempt (and possibly the ones that came after) were all worse decisions. Maybe even stealing from the bishop for all that that had saved his life. And however much of a decision had been involved in taking that poor child's forty-sous piece.

Still, Valjean had told himself that he was making a terrible decision from the moment he had first resolved to go to Arras but it had all worked out in the end for everyone but Champmathieu whom everyone just seemed to forget about. He felt a strange compulsion to go see the wretched man but he pushed that aside because now was really not the time for such thoughts.

"Why does anyone get married?" Valjean asked rhetorically.

"To continue their family lines, to have children to one day help with the work, for financial reasons, because it is what society expects, because they wish to remain respectable while engaging in activities only permitted in marriage," Javert counted off on his fingers.

Valjean felt strangely sad that he had missed the most obvious (though perhaps, sadly, not the most common) reason for marrying.

"When there is love involved how can it be anything but respectable given that love comes from God?" Valjean asked.

Javert gave him a look that said 'Do you really want me to answer that?' and Valjean really did not want to hear him listing off every instance of love gone wrong or being torn apart by society.

"How have you even managed to find the time to fall in love?" Javert demanded, throwing his hands up in the air. "She's been confined to a hospital bed dying since you two met!"

"This was several months ago," Valjean pointed out. "And I have heard of such things happening before. People often grow fond of those that care for them."

"Is this about the child?" Javert wondered, trying to make sense of what was happening and clearly believing that it was impossible for anyone to have actually fallen in love with a prostitute. "You can still pay to make sure she has a better life than she is due. I cannot believe I am encouraging this but I can live with moderation. And you can find another child to take in if you do not wish to have your own without having to marry the mother as well!"

Valjean watched him placidly. "I like Cosette."

That set him off all over again.

He did feel the slightest bit of guilt at so distressing the Inspector when he was only trying to help but he consoled himself that this was not being done solely for his own amusement. No, he was preparing the way and softening the blow for Javert to find out that he was – if she permitted it – going to be personally raising Cosette after Fantine's death.

And who knew? He might just be so relieved that there would be no wedding that he would more-or-less just accept it.

That might just be wishful thinking on his part, however.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Cosette?" Valjean began, telling himself that he was absolutely not feeling nervous. There was no reason to be nervous. It was just a question of names, after all, and he had traded one for another easily enough. It really did not matter what she called him.

Cosette immediately set aside her doll and ran up to him, beaming. "Hello!"

Valjean couldn't help the smile that came over his own face just then. "Child, there is something I must speak with you about."

Cosette nodded and tried to look serious. It was adorable. "What is it?"

"You know that your mother is very sick, right?" he asked rhetorically.

Cosette looked down and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. "I know. She says that she doesn't know if she's ever going to get better. Is…is my mama going to die?"

What could he say to that? He would have had to broach the subject somehow but to talk to a child of her mother's imminent passing…He wished that he knew what to say. Were there words for times like this?

"I do not know, child," Valjean said at last, absently taking her hand in his.

Tears began to swim in her eyes. "I don't want her to die!"

"No one wants her to die," Valjean promised her, almost automatically. "And she may not."

"B-but what if she does?" Cosette persisted.

"If your mother dies," Valjean said very slowly. "If your mother dies then I will take care of you."

She looked almost happy to hear this. "You will?"

"Of course I will," Valjean said firmly, nearly hurt that she even had to ask. But she was a child and her mother wondered the same thing. He told himself that it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with how life had treated them in the past. Hadn't he been astonished that the bishop had let him stay? The bishop had been the best of men and never gave him reason to think otherwise.

"If I cannot stay with mama then I want to stay with you," Cosette decided, completely unprompted. "You saved me."

Valjean blinked at that. "Oh, child, I did nothing," he hastened to correct her. "Your mother was the one who wanted you back by her side and Inspector Javert was the one to go to Montfermeil and bring you back here."

"Mama wanted me with her since the minute she left," Cosette said matter-of-factly and Valjean wondered just how many times Fantine had had to reassure her child of that before she began to believe it. "And Inspector Javert went there because you told him to. He said."

Of course he had and probably while making it quite clear it had meant nothing to him.

"Besides," she added, unwittingly confirming his suspicions, "I don't think he likes me."

"He likes you just fine," Valjean claimed.

Cosette looked skeptically at him.

"He…does not spend much time around children," he said delicately.

"You saved me," Cosette said again. "You are the kindest man I know and you always play with me and make sure everyone is being nice to me. If Mama dies then I want to stay with you." She looked down. "Unless you want to send me away. Please don't send me away! I like it here."

"I won't send you away," Valjean assures her, shocked. The thought had never even crossed his mind. This precious child deserved so much more than to just be cast off and made someone else's concern with his just paying them for the privilege.

Cosette nodded, clearly relieved and smiling again despite what her living within Valjean's keeping would mean. "I lived with my Mama and I lived with those bad people and one day I may go live with you. I don't want anything to do with them but I like you."

"Cosette," Valjean said, uncertainty gnawing away at him. He had to ask, however. He had promised he would and, despite himself, he found himself hoping that she would answer in a particular way.

"Yes?" she asked innocently.

"Would you like me to be your papa?"

There. It was out now. He silently cursed himself for just saying is so plainly but how else could he have said it? What manner of dressing it up would have made it easier to just leave hanging out there, painfully awaiting her response?

He did not have long to wait.

The moment Cosette comprehended the question she threw herself into his arms with cries of 'Papa!'


	7. Chapter 7

It might have been any other day. Valjean had thought it was at first but the moment he took Cosette to see Fantine, she had looked right at him and announced that today was the day. She did not elaborate on what it was the day for but that was rather self-evident and it might be cruel to tell Cosette that her mother was planning (well, not planning, precisely, more like expecting to) die that day before it actually happened. It would not be kind, either, to just let the death take the girl by surprise and yet Valjean could not bring himself to warn her of what was coming any more than Fantine could.

Valjean had asked a doctor if what Fantine was predicting was true and, though the doctor could not be certain on a date, he had been assured that it would not be long now. Perhaps it would be today. He only hoped that Fantine's certainty on the matter would not be what sealed her fate.

Cosette hadn't noticed that anything was going on at first, chattering away as she always did but before long even she could feel the tension in the air.

"Mama," she said, frowning and peering closely at her mother. "Mama, what is wrong?"

"Nothing, Cosette," Fantine had lied. Or was it a lie? She had had many long weeks to make her peace with her fate since she had been delivered from a life on the street. And all she had ever wanted for as long as Valjean had known her (which was not, admittedly, as long as it perhaps should have been) was to be reunited with her darling daughter and they had had several weeks together where they saw each other every day. "I am merely tired."

"I'm tired, too," Cosette agreed, lying down next to her mother and snuggling against her.

"And why is that?" Fantine inquired.

"I had a bad dream last night," Cosette said simply.

"Will you tell me about it?" Fantine requested.

Cosette nodded obligingly. "I dreamed that I was with a lot of people and everyone was smiling and laughing. You were there and Papa and even Inspector Javert!"

Fantine smiled knowingly at Valjean at Cosette's use of the word 'Papa' and patted her child's hair softly.

For his part, Valjean did not regret being proven wrong and felt that same warmth that he always did at that word from her lips.

"That sounds like a nice dream," he offered.

Cosette glanced up at him. "It was at first but then everyone started to go away. First Mama and then when I started crying you put your hand on my shoulder and said it was going to be alright. But then more people started disappearing and I kept calling for them to come back but they didn't. And then it was just you and me. Then this boy came and I was happy because I had a friend but then you went away, too." Her gaze was almost accusatory.

"I would never go away," Valjean promised. Not until he was forced to, through death or through capture. The one was rather unlikely now but the other was inevitable one day but he still had a few good years left in him.

Fantine's eyes were distant but she managed an encouraging smile for Cosette's sake. Cosette's clear fear of abandonment must not be easy to face and Valjean was only grateful that she appeared not to have dreamed of her time with the Thénardiers.

"You promised you wouldn't when Mama went away and I tried to hold onto your hand but you would not let me and then the boy grabbed my hand and you left and I couldn't go after you," Cosette cried out. "I was looking at him and I almost didn't see you go. You said that it was better. I was happy and I didn't need you but I did. I didn't want you to go away!"

He always tried to keep his contributions here, when Cosette was with her mother, to a minimum so as to not intrude on their time together and it was especially important today.

Still, the hour of Fantine's departure drew steadily nearer so he had to say something. "I will not leave you, Cosette. Not as long as I am living."

Cosette blinked her large blue eyes at him. "Will you promise me that you will live forever?"

Valjean smiled sadly at her. "No one can promise that, my child. But I will live as long as I can and you will be a grown-up before you have to worry about that."

Cosette continued to gaze upon him solemnly for a long moment before she nodded. "I believe you."

"I believe you, too," Fantine declared but her voice was getting weaker.

That sort of faith…if he had been at all worthy of it then she would not be here. But there was nothing that could be done to change the past and so he had to just strive to be worthy of her trust going forward. She had already gifted to him the most precious thing she possessed and it was not a gift he took lightly.

Cosette noticed this and scrambled into a sitting position before she turned in terror to face her mother. "Mama?"

"I am fine, Cosette," Fantine told her softly.

Cosette put her hand on her mother's face experimentally. "You don't look fine. You look sick. You look like the Thénardiers' dog did before it died."

Valjean did not know that a dying dog looked much like a dying human but, in a way, death was death.

"I am just going to sleep," Fantine insisted.

Cosette's eyes filled with tears. "Well I don't want you to!"

"I do not want to, either, my love, but it is my time," Fantine said gently. "God is calling me back to his side now and so there's nothing to cry about."

"I'll never see you again," Cosette sobbed.

"Yes, you will," Fantine said, raising a weakened hand to brush Cosette's hair behind her ear. "Just not for a long time yet. In one hundred years I give you permission to see me again."

Cosette started crying even harder. "O-one hundred years? Don't go, Mama! I'll miss you!"

"I will miss you, too, but remember that I will be watching down on you every day," Fantine's voice was a mere whisper now and her breathing was becoming more laborious. "Every time you see a rainbow or a butterfly or feel the wind caress you, that will be me making sure that you know how much I love you."

"I know, Mama." Cosette's words were barely audible through her tears. "I love you."

Despite the clear distress that Cosette was in, Fantine was actually smiling a smile of heartbreaking joy. It was not that she wished to see her beloved daughter in pain or to leave her behind but who would not be gratified to be so loved in their final moments?

"My Cosette," she managed to murmur, her eyes starting to flutter. "Oh, my beautiful Cosette…"

It was perhaps for the best that Cosette's eyes were closed at the exact moment when her mother passed from this world. Even if she was there for the death, it would be easier not to have to have that moment replaying constantly in her mind whenever she closed her eyes. Valjean had not been certain that it was a good idea to have Cosette here at all Fantine's death but Cosette had never been more stubborn and Fantine hadn't the heart to separate from her a moment before she absolutely had to. And perhaps, Valjean reasoned, this added pain that came from being present would not be as haunting as the regret for not being there for her mother at such an important time.

Valjean would have been there regardless but, as he well knew, that simply was not the same.

Cosette was still shaking and still clutching at her mother's hand. By now she had realized that Fantine was dead and let out a heartrending cry.

He did not know what to do. He knew that she would probably not react well to being removed from her mother but he did not want her to still be clinging to the dead woman when her body cooled. That would be difficult for anyone and far too much for a fragile child.

He wished that someone, anyone, were here to help him get through this. Even Javert would be acceptable because he always felt more like he knew what he was doing in the face of Javert's clear uncertainty.

But this wasn't about him, this was about Cosette. Fantine, too, but she was dead now and would have only wished for him to make things easier for Cosette.

He tentatively touched her shoulder and that seemed to be the right thing to do as she practically flew into his arms and held on so tight it seemed like she would never let go.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That night Cosette refused to eat. Well, it wasn't a refusal so much as her sitting at the table for an hour and just staring at her food before Valjean gave up and took her plate away.

Normally, she was such a lively child. Even with her mother gravely ill the entire time Valjean had known her, she had been very happy. Perhaps it was the fact that she had barely remembered her mother before being reunited with her and she had been sick the entire time they had been together again and so it was easy to get used to. It had only taken a few days for her to leave her fears behind her and, while she was still not pretty, she was no longer ugly.

Tonight she sat on the floor, and just stared at the stove. Valjean tried to ask a few tentative questions about how she was feeling and she responded in barely intelligible mumbles.

Valjean tried to think back to the last time he had had somebody he cared for die. For all he knew (though he tried very hard not to think of this), his sister and all of her children were dead by now once he had unwilling been forced to abandon them. His brother…he had had a brother once, but found him even more difficult to recall that those who had died before he left home. Perhaps he was dead. Chances were that at least one of the nine were and maybe more.

His brother was a healthy and hard-working man on his own so there was no particular reason to think that he was not still toiling away at some trade wherever he was. It was hard to concern himself much for him as his brother had never been his responsibility, not like his sister's family.

His sister and her youngest son he was not as concerned with as he was with the other six children because, unlike with poor Fantine, Jeanne was legitimately a widow and society was not unduly harsh towards widows. He tried to think back to what he had once heard, the words he had saved in his heart and then promptly thrust into the very back of it since he had known just how futile worrying for them would be. The boy had been going to school and learning to read in his childhood which would almost guarantee him a brighter future than Valjean had had. His sister had had employment, too, and he knew enough of factory pay to know that one worker's wage was sufficient to support two people.

The other children, though…What had she done with them? Had she found them someplace to go? Had she just snuck away with her youngest son in the middle of the night? How could she have found the words to tell her children that they were alone in the world?

And it was all because of…But no. It was a long time ago and he could not think like that.

For all he knew they were all alive, as well, and so thinking of them would not help him understand.

He had had no time to watch his father die as it had all been so quick. His father had died when he not present. There had been witnesses and they said that it was instantaneous, or near-so. One moment he had been up in a tree trying to make a living pruning and the next he had lost his balance and broken his neck. Valjean had not known of such things at the time but now he was aware that it was very rare but entirely possible for a man to live on after sustaining slightly lesser injuries. He had not wanted his father to die but to live on completely unable to move anything below his neck and knowing what a burden he was to the wife and children he had once supported? That would have been worse, he thought.

His mother, though…His mother had wasted away from milk fever. If they had been able to afford a doctor she might have lived. Was he thinking of her and the death that her poverty had condemned her to when he found he could not stay his hand when his sister's son was dying? It was the youngest son, too, so clearly the boy was able to survive even without what he had done.

But there was no point in thinking about that waste, either.

He could barely call these memories to the surface, much less recall his emotions about them. He must have been sad. He still had his mother and his sister after his father's death, however, and his sister to help him through losing their mother.

Cosette had no one. No one but him.

She continued to be lost in a quiet fog of her own grief until it was time for her to go to bed and then she suddenly became nearly hysterical.

"No!" she shouted. "No, no, no!"

"Cosette, my child, what ails you?" Valjean cried out. It hurt to see her so terrified.

He found her suddenly at his side, clutching at his shirt. "I-I can't go to sleep."

"Why not?" Valjean asked, bewildered.

"B-because Mama said that she was going to sleep but she didn't. She died," Cosette said, tears forming in her eyes again.

This child knew too much at too young of an age and Valjean's heart broke for her.

No one had wanted to say 'death' but it was obvious that their little euphemism was now causing Cosette problems.

"Yes, that is true," Valjean agreed slowly. "But she went to sleep last night and woke up this morning. And I went to sleep and woke up this morning. So did you and everyone else. When you and I go to sleep tonight, we will wake up tomorrow morning."

Still, Cosette hesitated. "Do you promise?"

"I promise."

Some of the fear left Cosette's eyes then and his word had never felt like it was worth more.

Still she did not release his shirt. "Will you stay with me tonight?"

Valjean scooped her up into his arms. "I will stay with you tonight and every night until you are ready to sleep by yourself."

She managed a watery smile then and threw her arms around his neck.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Javert wondered, once again, what it was that he was doing here at the funeral of a prostitute who had died a far better death that she deserved. He certainly did not care about Fantine's passing.

The church had been completely filled during her funeral service and now there were even more people at the graveyard. This was the kind of turnout he would have expected for somebody important like Monsieur Madeleine's funeral, not this near-anonymous harlot that the mayor had, for lack of a better word, adopted.

"What am I doing here?" he murmured.

"Probably the same thing everyone else is doing here," Bamatabois said, casually stepping up beside him.

"And what is that?" Javert asked tiredly.

"Spending just a few hours improving our standing in Monsieur le maire's eyes by making him think that we give a damn that that prostitute is dead," Bamatabois said matter-of-factly.

Javert shook his head. "That's not it."

Bamatabois smirked. "I think it is."

"Maybe that's why you're here," Javert said stiffly. "Although I cannot believe that you actually came to her funeral."

Bamatabois tilted his head. "Me in particular? Why ever not?"

Javert sighed. "You have no idea who Fantine was, do you?"

"Of course I do!" Bamatabois insisted. "She's that prostitute that he's been obsessing over for weeks."

"She's the prostitute that he only met after you complained she attacked you after you threw snow down her dress," Javert said pointedly.

Bamatabois looked confused.

"That…sort of thing happens to you far more often than it does to most people, doesn't it?" Javert realized.

"Well if it happened to me once then it happens far more often to me than it does to most people," Bamatabois said logically. "But it doesn't matter if I remember that. Does Madeleine?"

"He did not arrive to 'save' Fantine from the jaws of justice until you had already…left," Javert replied.

Bamatabois breathed a sigh of relief. "And you will not tell him this, will you? I would hate for him to do something completely unreasonable like blame me for what I'm sure was a very vicious assault."

Javert rolled his eyes. "I have better things to do with my time."

"We should get in line," Bamatabois said suddenly, nodding towards the line of 'mourners' who were assembling to offer condolences to Madeleine and Cosette.

Despite his reluctance to make it seem like he was taking advice from the likes of Bamatabois, he had been intending to do just that and so he followed the other man to the end of the line and waited in pointed silence until he reached the mayor.

"Javert," Madeleine said, sounding a little surprised. "Thank you for coming."

"I am sorry that you are so saddened by this," Javert told him. Too late he realized that that could be taken either to mean that he was not happy that Madeleine was upset at all or that he did not think that Madeleine should be so upset at Fantine's death. Well, he meant both so it was just as well.

Madeleine nodded at him and he turned to Cosette.

"It is a terrible thing to lose a mother at so young an age but you are now in the care of a very fine man."

Cosette reached for Madeleine's hand. "I know."


	8. Chapter 8

Valjean had owned a factory for several years now and its success and capacity for profit continued to surprise him. He had set 600,000 francs aside years ago just in case he ever suddenly went out of business or (more probably at the time) he was discovered and had to flee. The money was untouched as his living expenses were taken out of his other earnings.

He now knew that the danger of being apprehended was gone as Javert was perhaps the only official in France who would place recapturing him and sending him back to Toulon above the embarrassment of not believing his confession in the first place and sending the wrong man to hell in his place. Javert, of course, was well and truly convinced and it took a great deal to change his mind.

Now, though the danger had passed, he had Cosette to provide for. He wasn't quite sure what he was doing there, having never been able to provide properly for his own nieces and nephews (a failure that still stung when he thought of it), but he reasoned that it was better to do too much than too little. No one had ever been injured from too much love.

He had been so poor for so long (money was meaningless in Toulon) and then so suddenly rich that sometimes he had trouble really understanding what money was worth to people. Was 600,000 francs enough? For him, certainly, it was more than enough. For Cosette? He had promised to care for her and she would need to live long after he had died. He was not an old man, he did not think, but age was beginning to creep up on him.

Cosette would probably like to get married one day, years and years into the future, though the money would ensure that it was not necessary and so she would need a dowry. The better the dowry the more choice she could have over her husband as she could choose anyone from a man whose family demanded a healthy dowry to someone with not a sous to his name who would need to survive on Cosette's fortune. He would not have her feel that she was not good enough. Never again.

Most of his money he would continue to give to the poor but as business expanded what harm would there be in earmarking a little for Cosette? No harm had befallen anyone when he had been setting aside his emergency fund in the first place.

Valjean had been in Montreuil long enough that he was well-used to being the wealthy philanthropist and mayor M. Madeleine (if he missed being able to use his real name…well, it was not enough to wish to return to prison) but he still did not think that he understood very much of about the day-to-day running of a factory. He had just been a regular worker and grateful beyond measure for being treated as such. Then one day he had gotten lucky and before he knew it he was in charge.

Because he did not feel himself qualified, he rarely interfered with what his foreman and forewoman thought best. This time, however, he did not feel he had a choice. Perhaps it would be easier for Madame Voclain to hear since she had only been enforcing his policies, if perhaps a little overzealously.

He left Cosette with his housekeeper (who, despite her protests, he had insisted on giving a raise since she would at times be trusted with caring for Cosette) and went to go meet with his forewoman. She greeted him, calm and placid as ever, and led him to her office.

"Yes, Monsieur le maire?" she began politely.

"I would like to speak to you of Fantine," Valjean told her. It occurred to him that, with the hundreds of workers Madame Voclain supervised, she might not remember Fantine by name. He hoped that she would at least remember firing her given the horrific consequences of that action, consequences he was sure that such a virtuous woman as Madame Voclain would never have imagined. "She was a worker here fired more than a year ago for having a child."

"Having a child when she had never been married," Madame Voclain corrected. "I know who she is."

Perhaps he shouldn't be surprised. Everyone seemed to know of Fantine when hundreds had showed up at her funeral. He was still not sure what to make of that. It would be nice to believe that they were genuinely touched by Fantine's story but where had they been when she needed them? Perhaps that was ungenerous. If Fantine had not been arrested, where would he himself have been?

"You know what became of her after her dismissal?" The question was almost rhetorical. HE could not see how anyone could know of her and not know that.

Madame Voclain's lips pursed with disapproval. "I do. It is shameful."

"It is shameful," Valjean agreed. "And yet I do not see that the blame lies with poor Fantine?"

Madame V stared uncomprehendingly at him. "She was the one to engage in inappropriate activities that led to a child when she had no husband. She is the one who sought to conceal it and, when she was caught, turned to the streets."

"Cosette is eight now," Valjean said practically. "Any sin you may think that she committed was nine years ago now. Did she deserve to be ruined for that?"

"I did not ask that she be ruined but she could not stay here," Madame Voclain said virtuously. "I gave her fifty francs for her sudden dismissal and it is no one's fault but her own that she did not seek out honest work such as washing or needlepoint."

That, Valjean felt, was not entirely true. Fantine had sewn nonstop all day and, between the forced prison labor driving down prices and Thénardiers greed, it had not been enough. But this good woman, as unforgiving as Javert it seemed, had only been taking her orders from him.

"How as Fantine's child even discovered, hidden away as she was in Montfermeil?" Valjean asked curiously. Fantine had never understood just what had betrayed her.

"It is human nature to be curious," Madame Voclain said delicately, clearly finding the matter distasteful. "Fantine wrote a letter to her child's guardian twice a month. Being illiterate, she paid someone to write it for her and to read the replies. This man was fond of wine and could not hold his tongue when influenced thus. He told those who cared to ask who and where Fantine was writing to and of her child. One woman chose to make the trip and confirmed the child's existence. By the time the news reached my ears, half the town knew. She no longer had the option to conceal it and, in accordance with your instructions on the subject and my own sense of propriety, she was dismissed."

"Why would that woman do this?" Valjean demanded. "What business was it of hers?"

"It was not," Madame Voclain replied calmly. "But people do love their gossip."

"Their idle amusement was not worth an innocent young woman's life!" Valjean cried out.

"I am certain that, if you asked them, they would not accept responsibility for what followed. They would point out that they merely spoke the truth." It was impossible to tell what his forewoman felt about the matter.

"When I set up the moral guidelines for factory workers, I did not intend to kill anyone," Valjean said quietly.

"And you did not," Madame Voclain insisted.

"None of this would have happened if I hadn't had these policies," Valjean argued.

"There was a long chain of events that led to that woman's death," Madame Voclain reminded him. "Many of them were set in motion before she even returned to Montreuil. If any of them had not occurred, maybe she would still be alive. I do not see why your factory regulations, which she was told of when she was hired, is more responsible than she was for putting herself in that situation to begin with."

Valjean nodded, reluctantly accepting that he was not at fault for everything that had befallen her. The fact that she had known the policy before being hired meant nothing, however, as there was only so much work to be had and Cosette was already a growing girl by the time she had arrived back in town. She was a local girl, Valjean believed. Oh, to have run away to seek one's fortunes and returned in disgrace to fall from grace. Fantine had deserved better and darling Cosette would get it.

"I had the best of intentions with those guidelines," Valjean said vaguely, wondering how it could have all gone so wrong. And if his good intentions here caused problems then what was to stop his good intentions elsewhere from doing the same? "I was a worker here once, if you'll remember, and I had seen so much abuse. Men were harassing women who merely wanted to work, workers were coming in drunk, women were openly sleeping with the foreman for preferential treatment…I just wanted to stop all of that."

"You did stop it," Madame Voclain said firmly. "I was a regular worker then, too, and things are much better now than they were before."

"And yet now there are new abuses and one woman that I know for a fact was destroyed by this," Valjean mused. It was so much simpler back before he had the power to ruin someone's life. He had never thought that he could do so so unwittingly! But then, hadn't he long-since had that power? After his sister's husband died he could have easily ruined his sister and nieces and nephew's lives at any time. And one dark night he had. Even if they were still alive, he had left them devastated.

Madame Voclain said nothing.

"I do not seek to undermine you here and I hope that you will not take offence but something that has the power to ruin someone should have some oversight. I do not want the mere presence of a child to be grounds for termination anymore. And in the future, please refer to me anyone who you believe should be dismissed as well as your reasoning for taking this action," Valjean ordered. "I would also like a list of everyone that you can remember dismissing and your reason for the dismissal. I will be asking this of the foreman as well."

A lesser person might have resented this new instruction and taken it to indicate a lack of faith but Madame Voclain was a kind if unforgiving soul and merely nodded her understanding.

It was too late for Fantine but Valjean would not let another person in his town share her fate if he could help it.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Javert was just finishing up his report but, instead of standing and waiting to be dismissed as he usually did, he hesitated.

Madeleine looked consideringly at him. "Was there something else you needed, Javert?"

"No, not exactly," Javert replied. "I was just wondering if you will be in mourning for Fantine. I notice that Cosette has been wearing black since it happened."

Madeleine nodded. "She doesn't quite understand the purpose of wearing black if someone that is important to you dies but she is not interested in what she wears, either. She misses her mother terrible."

Javert wasn't sure just how much she could possibly miss a woman she had only spent a few weeks with and who had been busy dying and being confined to a hospital bed the entire time but he suppose he could not prove his theory one way or the other. There was also no need to antagonize Madeleine who preferred to believe the best of everyone even when it was not supported by reality and who would most certainly take offence at what he saw as a slight against that orphan. Besides, it really did not matter.

"Will you be going into mourning?" Javert asked again.

"I am indeed," Madeleine confirmed. "I think it will be easier for Cosette if we are in mourning together. She has been so worried about being left alone since it happened."

"Is that so," Javert said, not pleased with the answer he had been able to elicit from the mayor.

"Come, Inspector, tell me what it is you really want to know," Madeleine said, looking like he knew exactly what Javert didn't want to say but was not going to make it easy for him.

"Are you a widower now, Monsieur le maire?" Javert asked reluctantly.

"Ah, I see where you would be concerned about that. Such a tragic and devastating loss might impact my ability to execute my duties," Madeleine said, nodding.

"Monsieur?" Javert prompted.

"You may rest easy, Javert, because I am not," Madeleine declared.

Javert blinked. "You are not? That is excellent news."

"Because this means that my ability to do my duty is not compromised," Madeleine said wryly.

"That was one of my concerns," Javert said, nodding. Most people would have stopped there but Javert believed in honesty and so he continued with, "Also, a mayor can't very well marry a prostitute. It would turn the world upside down and be an affront to every decent citizen in not only Montreuil but in all of France!"

"I think you may be exaggerating slightly," Madeleine said placatingly. "All of France cannot possibly know anything about me."

"Perhaps not all," Javert amended. "But do not underestimate how your influence is growing. The tale of your actions at Arras will probably spread and though that will not be a favorable impression, people will want to know who that man who would do such a thing would be and so they will learn of your more sensible qualities as well."

Sensible was, perhaps, not the right word to refer to Madeleine's excessive charity but it was certainly more sensible than pretending to be a convict.

Madeleine smiled at him. "I am sure that people will continue to not concern themselves with me."

And apparently he refused to see how his praise was being sung everywhere in the surrounding area. Javert had certainly not failed to notice before his arrival and especially whenever he had occasion to leave Montreuil.

"Besides," Madeline continued, "not long ago you were under the impression that I was a convict. Surely that would have been more appropriate then?"

Javert carefully did not wince. He did permit himself a shudder, however. "A prostitute and a convict? That is a match made in hell, Monsieur." He should know. "What did change your mind about marrying her?"

"I carefully considered what you said, Inspector," Madeleine replied after a moment.

"You did?" Javert did not know if he was surprised or not. He knew that Madeleine was a good man who did listen to those under his command but, at the same time, he had seemed rather stubbornly intent on that foolish notion when Javert had left that day.

"I still maintain that there is nothing wrong with two people who are in love getting married, as long as they are not already married and are old enough to do so," Madeleine told him, "but you seemed so…uncertain about the match that I wondered if he were not being a little overly hasty. I knew my own mind but I could not know for sure what Fantine felt. And if it had not been for the fact that she was so ill we would not have been considering such a thing so soon into our acquaintance."

'Uncertain' was one for it but it was not the correct one. He had been very certain of what a terrible idea it would have been. As would any sane man, for that matter. He just did not understand how a man so ordinarily sane and practical as Monsieur le maire could be so…naïve, perhaps. Was that it? One day in Toulon would teach him that his worldview was hopelessly unrealistic but the thought of a man like Madeleine so much as looking at Toulon…it would be abhorrent.

"And so you decided not to get married?" Javert prompted.

Madeleine sighed. "We decided to wait and get to know each other a little better first. Unfortunately, she…We did not have time. And even when she knew she was dying, we did not wish to be married simply because of her death. But she would have made any man a fine wife."

Perhaps before she had become a prostitute or had Cosette at all but then she still would have had that moral weakness in her. But it did not matter now that she was safely dead and gone.

"I see."

"I still intend to raise Cosette as my own, however," Madeleine declared firmly, looking very much like he was expecting some sort of an argument. Maybe on another day Javert would have given it to him (though given that the child had no other prospects but to be sent off an another family and hope they weren't like the Thénardiers or to be sent to a convent, both at the mayor's expense, he knew he had no a hope of changing his mind) but he was just too pleased to be able to avoid the scandal to bother. No one would believe that Madeleine was the girl's natural father for if he was then why would she and her mother have been in such a state? It could not be apathy on the part of Madeleine as his recent actions so clearly demonstrated.

If he wanted to waste his time and money on a little girl born in the gutter…Well, at least this might ensure she did not fall into a life of crime like her mother.

"Cosette Madeleine," Javert said slowly. "Interesting."

There was a strange look on Madeleine's face as he repeated, "Cosette Madeleine."


	9. Chapter 9

Valjean was sitting in his office, answering some letters that had recently come from Paris about the management of his little town. Ordinarily he would have had no idea why people from Paris were even aware of him at all, let alone interested in his ideas but he supposed that Javert might have had the right of it that the tale of his confession had spread and so people had heard of him. If he divorced the story from himself (for he never felt that what he did was particularly notable) and thought of it as one man trying to claim to be a completely different man and asking to be sent to the galleys for the rest of his life in the guilty man's place…and with the one being a respected public official and the other a repeat offender…Perhaps he could understand the interest, just a little.

And at least it was leading to people asking him about his public improvement plans in Montreuil instead of trying to lock him up not for being a criminal but for being a madman. He would not have liked being imprisoned for being insane any more than for being guilty, especially when Champmathieu would suffer a fate that no man should suffer no matter what happened to him, and he most certainly could not be taken while Cosette had need of him.

Cosette Madeleine. It was still so strange to think of it. When he had taken that name for himself, he had never expected to bestow it to another but Cosette was in need of a name as well and what better name to give the innocent child of a woman destroyed by society's refusal to forgive than Madeleine? It made his new life feel just a little more real. It was a good thing, too, since it seemed that he would be keeping it.

A young man walked in then, practically still a child. He could not have been more than twenty. Valjean liked to think that he could at least recognize everyone who lived in Montreuil by now even if he did not know everyone's name and he had not seen this man before.

Curiously, despite the fact that one could hardly walk into the mayor's office by accident, even if they could not read, the young man was peering at Valjean with something like bewilderment.

"Hello," Valjean said politely. "May I help you?"

The boy frowned. "Sorry, I just…I've seen you somewhere, right?"

Valjean cast his memory back. People did change as they grew older, certainly, but he did not see how it could have been when the boy was a child. Wouldn't he know who he was as Madeleine then? He certainly hadn't seen any children in Toulon.

"I do not believe so," he replied. "Perhaps you have confused me with somebody else?"

The boy considered it for a moment before shaking his head. "Nah, I don't think that's it. I've got a good memory for faces, you see. You have to be when you live like me. Always know which people to avoid, which will give you a little something extra, which inspectors just assume that you must be up to something and so will give you trouble. That sort of thing."

"Well you will have to tell me if it occurs to you," Valjean said placidly, deciding that since he was not feeling the stirring of recognition, if such a meeting had happened in the past then the impetus to remember and remind was on the boy. He was sure that the meeting could not be very important if they had both forgotten and so that could not be the reason why the boy was here. "In the meantime, what brings you to my door?"

The boy just stared at him. For a man hiding his real identity, even a man who was no longer being hunted, such scrutiny was disconcerting.

"It's probably stupid," the boy said slowly.

A lot of people in town felt that way about their problems, as if as important as it was to them it was beneath the notice of the mayor. He would freely admit that he did not have the time to address every minor squabble in town, he at least liked to hear people out when they came to his office.

He had done what he could to convince people to come to him when they had need of him and their reluctance to bother him with such trifles as their increased inability to survive simply because of their increased inability to survive meant that when someone had need of him it was usually important. Or they were trying to use his influence for their own advantage but he was getting better at detecting that and Javert had taken it upon himself since the trial to keep watch for such things. Valjean liked to think that with the lack of watching him to see if he was, in fact, himself Javert just had a lot more free time and preferred to spend it working.

Sometimes he found that people did not want to air their dirty laundry around him because he was the mayor and if there was a chance that they had done anything wrong (or that anybody would think that although they were perfectly certain that they were in the right) then they did not want the story to spread. He did stop by and try to help whenever he happened to witness a conflict going on while he was walking the streets but those all seemed to miraculously sort themselves out when he got near them.

"Please do go on," Valjean invited. "I do not believe that you would have come to this town to see me if it were not important to you and if it is important to you and you have come all this way then I can at least do you the courtesy of listening."

"It's just…I'm a Savoyard," the boy explained. "And everybody says that you're good to the Savoyard boys who pass through here. I never had the opportunity to come this way when I was younger – I'm from way up near Digne – but I'm glad just the same. Not many are, you see."

Digne. It couldn't be. Little Gervais had been but a child, not a full-grown man. But then, how many years had passed since then? Eight, perhaps? Children grew up. It was a coincidence, though. After all this time of trying to search for the child he had stolen from (why had he done it? Hadn't he been in the process of deciding to turn his life around? What had possessed him to steal from first a bishop and then a child instead of any of the people who had abused him if he must have stolen from someone at all? He truly had been hopeless back then, hadn't he?), he couldn't have just walked straight into his office and announced it one day. And, as the boy had said, Digne was a fair distance away. It had taken him weeks to make his way from the Bishop to Montreuil.

It took him a moment (and noticing the expectant eyes of the boy) for Valjean to remember that he had been thanked. As always, it made him uncomfortable, especially considering that he was essentially being thanked for his feeble and possibly futile efforts to make up for that child he had so abominably wronged so long ago. It was so easy for people to get lost in the wind and yet he, far less deserving, was known – both Valjean and Madeleine – to a great many people.

"I try to help out where I can," he said quietly, bowing his head. "I have been greatly blessed by our good Lord and I wish to share that blessing with those who have not been so fortunate."

The boy smiled, looking almost amused. He knew that a lot of poorer people were skeptical of God's mercy. He knew that when he was at his lowest 'skeptical' was putting it politely. "Whatever it is that makes you give so much to boys like I was is a good thing."

"Are you in need of some work?" Valjean asked suddenly, a little chagrined that he had not thought to ask sooner. This boy kept talking about the generosity he had shown to boys like him in the past and he had not thought that perhaps he was hoping for a little of that generosity himself? He was a little older than the Savoyard boys usually were but Valjean hated to have to turn down a soul in need.

"I'll be fine," the boy said dismissively, though not really answering the question. "I'm not really a chimney sweep anymore and at any rate I'll wager that your town must have the cleanest chimneys in all of France!"

Valjean smiled gently at the jest. "Perhaps. I find cleanliness to be very important."

Valjean would like to think that he was not a vain man but he did place a certain importance on cleanliness. There had been years, far too many years, where he had felt that he would never be clean again. Even when he had first been released he had not been able to shake that feeling, doubly so after realizing just how wretched his soul had become. Now, despite the lingering guilt he felt over Champmathieu (for even if there was literally nothing else that could have been done to save the man after his arrest, if Valjean had not gone on the run in the first place then there would have been no cause to have confused that poor man with him in the first place), he had learned to feel like he was clean again.

It was something he tried to teach others, would certainly teach Cosette, and would perhaps never cease to prize highly. Other men, freer men, did not always understand the importance he placed upon that but it was the case of taking things for granted until you were not able to anymore.

"If not work, what brings you to our humble town?" Valjean asked casually. "You are a long way from home, young man."

"They said I had to come," the boy said, shrugging.

"They?" Valjean repeated, puzzled.

"A few months back some policeman came up to me and asked me questions about something that happened nearly a decade ago. Then he told me that I needed to go to Arras. Can you believe it? All the way from Digne to Arras!" the boy exclaimed.

"What…" Valjean trailed off, swallowed. His throat felt suddenly dry. "What's your name? I do not believe that you said."

"What?" the boy looked surprised. "My name is Gervais. And you're Monsieur Madeleine, of course."

Of course.

It could still be a coincidence but all of these coincidences were starting to blur together to reform into one impossible picture.

"It is a pleasure to meet you, Monsieur Gervais," Valjean said automatically.

Gervais laughed. "Me? A Monsieur? Imagine!"

But he did look pleased. Valjean had found it just as incomprehensible when the Bishop had called him that but no less grateful. And he had deserved it even less than this poor boy. Valjean had come to learn that things like addresses and manners said more about the person employing them than the person on the receiving end.

"Why did they tell you that you must go to Arras?" Valjean inquired.

"A long time ago, I was walking along and I dropped a forty-sous piece," Gervais said casually. "That may not seem like a lot to a man such as you but to me it was half of everything I had."

Valjean's mind drifted back to the days when the eighteen-sous he made as a pruner (he did miss that, surprisingly, though he had never been very fond of it at the time. He wished that he had more time for gardening) was enough to keep his family afloat in a world trying increasingly hard to drag them under. And then when it had succeeded…But no. Enough of that.

"I understand the value of a sous," he said instead. "What happened to your sous? Did you lose them?"

Gervais hesitated. "Not…exactly. There was a man, you see. I had never seen someone like him before. Frightened me half out of my wits, he did, especially when he stepped on my piece! I don't even think he knew that he did it, honestly, because he didn't pick it up or nothing, just kept his foot on it. Well, I was scared but I needed the money so I went up to him and tried to get it back but he kept ignoring me. I just kept asking and then he yelled at me and I ran away."

"I'm sorry," Valjean said because what else was there to say?

Another shrug. "It was a long time ago. I honestly barely even remembered it before everyone started asking about it."

"Half of everything you had and you just forgot?" Valjean asked incredulously.

"Well, it was hard for awhile after that. Very hard. I survived, though, and it's been so many years that whether I had kept or lost that particular forty-sous piece would make no difference in my life today," Gervais explained.

"That's a very mature attitude," Valjean managed to say. He knew that, intellectually, that was probably true. Unless the lack of money led to losing your home or someone dying or not being able to stay together, as more time passed the fact that there was not much money at one point became far less important.

"Is it?" Gervais asked flippantly but, again, he did look pleased. "I tried telling them that I didn't want to go to Arras. I had no particular reason to stay in Digne but I had no reason to go to Arras, either, and it would take forever to get there. They told me that they caught the man who stole from me all those years ago and they needed me to identify him but I told them that I didn't even care anymore and it wasn't worth the journey. They didn't understand why I wouldn't want to waste all this time over a crime from eight years ago when I should be outraged about it forever and made me go anyway. At least they paid for me to go."

At this, Valjean frowned. Up until then he could follow the story quite well. He was relieved that his crime had not destroyed this young boy's life even if that did not make it any less wicked to have done what he had and after the Bishop's forgiveness, too. But now something did not make sense to him.

"I believe that I know the trial you are speaking of," Valjean told him. "It was the trial of Jean Valjean, yes?"

Gervais nodded, surprised. "How did you know?"

"I happened to be at the trial and they said that they had not been able to locate you," Valjean informed him.

Gervais rolled his eyes. "Oh, they found me alright. They just didn't like what they heard. It's pretty rotten of them to just pretend that I wasn't there because they didn't like what I had to say."

"What did you say?" Valjean asked curiously.

"Well they were going on and on about how that guy should go to Toulon because he was Jean Valjean and had stolen that forty-sous piece from me. They thought a bishop had been robbed but the bishop had denied it and was dead anyway. He was on trial for some apples or something but nobody was talking about that. And if their whole case is about how awful it was that I was stolen from and I'm just annoyed that I have to be there then it makes them look really foolish for obsessing about it themselves," Gervais said reasonably.

"I see," Valjean said faintly, wondering once again at a justice system that judged people for things they were not charged for, felt perfectly free to just ignore inconvenient confessions, and apparently hid away inconvenient witnesses as well.

"They might have still made me go to the trial and just not asked me questions about how upset I was if it hadn't been for that other thing," Gervais said softly.

"Other thing?" Valjean repeated.

Gervais nodded. "I looked at that man, the man that they said was Jean Valjean. And who knows? Maybe it really was. But even though it had been several years, I don't forget a face. The man that robbed me made my life really hard for a long time. That man, no matter what they said, was not it."

It would appear that the trial was even more of a farce than he had initially suspected if so much effort had gone into perpetuating a clear lie.

Gervais was staring at him again. "I don't forget a face. It will probably sound completely absurd and I almost do not want to say it but I think I know where I've seen you before."

Valjean said nothing.

"You were that man. That man that robbed me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just kind of love the thought of other people who aren't Javert recognizing Valjean, even if not immediately. Javert seemed to pick up on it pretty quickly even if he just couldn't accept that he was taking orders from a convict and the Thénardiers apparently had no trouble with it.


	10. Chapter 10

Valjean stopped breathing, vaguely registering how odd it was to have been finally correctly identified just when he had thought that the danger was over. He had not recognized this boy but the boy had recognized him and he must have changed at least as much over the years. Most people who thought they saw one man in another man it could not be would not even go as far as Javert who had attempted to investigate and explain it. But this boy thought it was impossible and still believed it and had still said it.

He should have known that this was a risk and should have prayed that their paths never crossed. Instead, he had actively searched the boy out, seeking only to make up for the wrong done to him. What had he been planning to say? What he planned if he was recognized? Had he had a plan. He no longer remembered. So many years had passed that he had begun to despair of ever finding Gervais, especially so far from Digne. Perhaps it was not surprising that the law had managed what he could not.

Cosette…He had to…had to…

The silence stretched on awkwardly between them. Valjean knew that he had to say something but he found that he could not.

To his surprise, Gervais eventually looked down. "Ah, I'm sorry."

Valjean started. Had Gervais changed his mind and decided that his theory was too ridiculous for him to have brought up?

"You look like you think I'm going to go running for an inspector," Gervais elaborated. "I'm not."

"No?" Valjean managed to say.

"It wouldn't do any good since that other guy is in prison," Gervais reasoned. "They don't seem to be too fond of letting people out once they put them in."

That was putting it mildly.

"And I already told you that I didn't care anymore about that coin."

"That is," Valjean began carefully. He cleared his throat and tried again. "That is not the way most people would see it."

Gervais shrugged. "It's not like that's anything new, me being different than others."

Being different had always bothered Valjean in a way that it clearly did not matter to Gervais. All he had ever wanted was to be like any other man. But this boy, who could come far closer than a man unable to use his real name ever could, did not care for such things. Such were the ironies of life, he supposed, feeling a sudden surge of gratitude that his act had not sent this boy into a life of crime himself.

"I don't understand. You said that losing that money caused you a lot of problems."

Gervais nodded. "Yes. Nearly nine years ago." His voice made it clear that he thought it was kind of ridiculous that they were still talking about this but Valjean could not just let it go at that.

"I have…experienced troubling events at least that long ago and longer that still upset me." Valjean hesitated before he went on. He had not denied Gervais' claims and it was not like a denial would likely change this boy's mind. The boy himself had denied any intention of reporting him and no one would believe him with Champmathieu as he was but the fear was hard to shake. Oh, how little reality mattered when you had expectations to meet! "It strikes me as odd that I appear to be more upset about robbing you than you are about having been robbed."

Gervais' expression did not change at this admission of guilt and he merely shrugged. "That's good, I guess. Means you probably won't rob other kids. Not that a mayor would have to outright steal things. He can cheat a man in other ways."

"I wouldn't!" Valjean protested wildly before his shoulders hunched." I understand why you would not believe me."

"I don't not believe you. I'm sure I don't know. I just got here but when I was asking about you people seemed to like you and I know what my boys say. People usually know if they're being cheated even if they can't do anything," Gervais told him. He snorted. "Well, unless they're those rich idiots and then they'll fall for anything!"

He did not seem to realize that, technically, 'rich idiot' would describe Valjean. He did not feel the need to bring it up or to say anything else at all for that matter.

Gervais sighed. "That wasn't the first time I been robbed. It wasn't the last. You didn't beat me for my coin and you didn't take everything I had and that's probably the nicest time I ever been robbed. I bee not paid for honest work before and turned my back for a second and my food was gone. Bad things happen all the time and this wasn't the biggest or worst of the lot."

That didn't make him feel any better. He felt a deep sadness settle on him again for how he had added to this boy's misery even though Gervais had clearly moved past that.

Something must have shown on his face for Gervais scowled at him. "Hey! Don't you dare pity me! I'm doing fine."

"I know you are," Valjean said quietly. "I just hate to see anyone suffer and I cannot bear it when this suffering is because of me. I'm sorry."

Gervais had clearly not expected this. "Thank you. I guess. Doesn't make much difference but it's a nice thought."

"No, I suppose it doesn't," Valjean agreed, sighing in resignation. So many things had happened, so much pain had been caused, and no amount of regret or attempts to make it right could ever change that.

He could bring prosperity to an entire town but that would not leave his sister and her children one iota better off than they had been when he had been forced to abandon them when they were cold and starving. He was raising Cosette but that did not change Fantine's fall from grace and her subsequent suffering and death. His opinion on reform was being sought by factions outside of Montreuil but that would not mean a thing to the unjustly imprisoned Champmathieu.

Dwelling on them might be a fair punishment for the guilt that he bore but he could not allow that stop him from moving forward and preventing himself from having any more regrets than were necessary. He was not sure how much blame he could bear before he was drowning in it.

"Just the same, I have something for you," Valjean said, reaching deep into his pocket and pulling out the coin that had begun all of this. He had taken to carrying it around with him since the trial, since he had attempted to destroy it in a frenzy. He had thought that he had needed the reminder but this boy deserved it more.

Gervais curiously reaches over and takes the coin. He stared intently at it, his brow furrowing. "Is this…?"

"That is the coin I took from you, yes," Valjean confirmed.

Gervais was still looking down at the coin in wonderment. "You kept it all this time? But why rob me at all if you weren't going to spend it? I guess you must have turned your life around pretty quick!"

Though he was still not looking at Valjean, Valjean himself felt that he could no longer look at Gervais. "I…did not mean to steal that from you."

Gervais thought it over before shrugging. "I could see that. You didn't seem to really notice me and you could have easily just automatically stepped on something rolling down towards you."

"It has been so long since then and I was going through something of a mental breakdown," Valjean said slowly. "I do not remember what happened or why. I will tell you that after you left and I realized what I had done, I tried to find you immediately. I called your name for as long as I could and I even asked a passing priest for help finding you but he did not know you and fled when I confessed."

Finally Gervais glanced back up at him. "I was wondering how they knew about that. I never told nobody because, well, there was nobody to tell. It would have been nice if you had found me and given it back but that's no reason to go admitting to stealing things!"

"I was trying to turn my life around," Valjean said simply. "Robbing a child was not a great start and then lying about it would have been worse."

"You didn't stick around to get arrested," Gervais pointed out.

"No one came to arrest me," Valjean replied. It was just the way with he had confessed at the trial. The sheer unevenness of police work continued to amaze him. "I had actually not expected there to be any criminal charges for it until I heard about the man that they thought was me."

"The man that they still think is you," Gervais said neutrally. "Assuming you are Jean Valjean."

Valjean bowed his head. "I told them the truth. That they convicted him anyway was beyond my control and with no way to save that man why leave? I do good work here."

"I have heard," Gervais said, nodding.

Valjean shook his head. "I'm sorry but I still do not understand your…lack of concern regarding my past. You do not just know that I was a thief but you were actually a victim yourself."

Gervais stared up at the ceiling and unconsciously began to play with his coin. "We all do what we have to to survive."

"I did not need to do that to live," Valjean said gloomily.

"And you no longer steal," Gervais said, shrugging.

"I want you to have this," Valjean said, taking out two gold Napoleons and passing them over to the boy.

Gervais accepted them almost reverently, peering closely at them. It was unlikely that he had ever seen a coin like this before let alone possessed one. The lot of the Savoyard child was an unhappy one. "What's this for?"

"I…feel bad," Valjean said, a little lamely.

Gervais actually laughed. "You did say that."

"I cannot change the past and maybe it is crass to try and buy forgiveness but that is not what I am trying to do at all. I just caused you to suffer and would now like to benefit your life in some way," Valjean said quietly.

"Well thank you, then," Gervais said casually, slipping the three coins into his pocket.

Valjean couldn't hide the brief flicker of surprise that crossed his face.

Gervais laughed again. "What? Did you think I was going to refuse because it's charity or something?"

"Perhaps," Valjean allowed. "At least initially. I have found that many of our most needy are the least inclined to take what they deem as charity or pity. Their physical needs matter less to them than their sense of dignity."

Gervais snorted. "They can hang their dignity. Dignity doesn't put food in your stomach. Pride is all well and good if you can afford it." The 'and I can't' hung in the air between them.

Valjean cleared his throat. "I am glad that I found you after all this time."

Gervais grinned at him. "No, Monsieur, I am glad to have found you. You got to feel better about something that doesn't even matter anymore and I am rich!"

Valjean's heart clenched painfully; he still well remembered the time when he would have thought that bit of pocket change was a fortune himself. "What do you plan to do once you leave here? Where will you go?"

Gervais looked surprised. "Oh, I don't know. I can't possibly go back to Digne; it's too far and there's nothing there anyway. I might stay here in town or try one of the neighboring towns, see if there's anything there for me."

"Would you like a job?" Valjean asked, almost before he realized what he was saying.

Gervais frowned, puzzled. "A job? What do you mean?"

"I own a factory here in town," Valjean explained. "We could always use another worker if you are interested."

Gervais' face lit up. "I suspect that you are only offering because you feel guilty about something that happened forever ago."

"But who needs pride," Valjean replied.

Gervais nodded. "Who needs pride indeed?"

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Javert was not entirely sure what to make of it when he heard that that witness at the trial, that Savoyard, had been given a job at Madeleine's factory by the man himself. Gervais (was that his name?) had not struck him as being particularly bright since he was certain that Valjean was not the man who had robbed him when it was confirmed by other, more reliable, sources that it was. Yes he had just been a child at the time and it was a long time ago but with such a traumatic event as a robbery he would think that the child would remember. He could have at least been less confident of his mistake!

And now to show up here and be here to stay…It was completely unexpected though he had to ask himself just how long he was going to let himself be completely shocked every time the mayor did something like that. It could not be healthy and it made him feel rather foolish.

He did not, as he was sorely tempted to do, immediately go to Madeleine and try to figure out just what the other man was thinking because he was still on duty and he could not neglect his post for the sake of simple curiosity.

When he had finished, he was making his way towards the mayor's office when he saw Madeleine walking along, evidently on his way home.

Javert immediately removed his hat. "Monsieur le Maire."

Madeleine nodded back at him. "Good evening, Inspector. Was there something you wished to speak with me about?"

"There was but it can wait until morning," Javert told him.

"Nonsense," Madeleine said briskly. "Why don't you walk with me and tell me on the way?"

That seemed sensible and so Javert bowed his head. "Very well." Unfortunately, despite the speeches he had been half-composing in his head while out on patrol that day, the only thing he could think to say way, "You do realize that it is things like this that helped convince me that you were Jean Valjean?"

Madeleine did not miss a step. "Things like what?"

"You hired that Savoyard, that Gervais," Javert elaborated. "That boy that Jean Valjean robbed so many years ago."

Madeleine tilted his head. "Ah but why would a man who had once robbed him then turn around and offer him a job?"

Javert considered the question. "It is not unheard of for a convict to have a conscience and wish to change. Very rare, particularly after a few years in Toulon, but it happens. The fact that they ultimately cannot change what they are is tragic but it is fact. Perhaps such a man would be trying to undo the wrong committed, although of course one action can never cancel out another."

"No, that is true," Madeleine said vaguely.

"Did you know who this boy was when you hired him?" Javert wanted to know. He would not put it past the mayor to just hire the boy on the spot because he was poor and needed work and not bother to inquire about any of the particulars. But at least the only thing of note in his past was his status as Valjean's victim right as he was breaking parole.

Madeleine nodded. "Yes. He told me that he came to see me to show his appreciation for what I had done for his fellows. It seems I am very popular among them."

Javert sighed internally. Madeleine never would acknowledge just how popular he was with everybody who did not have some sort of jealousy motivating their dislike. And his actions with the other Savoyard also added to his once suspicions.

"He explained that he had heard of me all the way up in Digne but the distance was such that coming to see me had never been practical until now. I asked what brought him here and he explained about the trial and I knew that I had to do something," Madeleine continued.

"Why, exactly, did you feel the need to do anything?" Javert queried. "What does it matter that Valjean wronged him? You may have been mistaken for him once but that does not mean that his sins are yours to correct."

Madeleine was quiet for a long while and, as they walked in silence, Javert wondered if the conversation was over.

Finally, they stopped in front of Madeleine's house. Javert had never been inside but he knew where it was located, of course.

"Perhaps not," Madeleine finally spoke. "But they must be corrected somehow and if not me then who would you propose do so?"

Javert did not have an answer for him. The truth was that sins could not be corrected and if they could it was the responsibility of the man who committed them to do the correcting. And if they could not, as Valjean could not (not that such a man would if he could), then the consequences must stand.

But it was such a small thing, hiring an extra worker. Madeleine probably would have done it even without the Valjean connection.

"Papa!" Cosette cried out, running out to greet him. "You're home!"

Madeleine's face changed immediately when he looked at that child. "Hello, my darling girl. Did you have a good day today?"

Cosette nodded. "I did! Catherine and I had a tea party!"

"That sounds like quite the adventure," Madeleine said warmly.

Cosette nodded seriously. "It was. It would have been better if you had been there, too."

Madeleine chuckled. "I will be. I promise."

Feeling distinctly uncomfortable, Javert quickly took his leave.


	11. Chapter 11

When Valjean came home that evening, he saw Cosette watching intently and trying to help as the portress was making dinner. He watched as Madame Martin had Cosette help mix something in a bowl.

He watched silently for a moment, a smile on his lips, wishing idly that Cosette could have a mother figure in her life. She needed a father, yes, but weren't mothers even more important for young girls? Cosette had had the best mother imaginable but now she was dead and Cosette was far from grown. If only the past was not what it was (wasn't he always thinking that?) and he could marry a woman to be a mother for Cosette without the guilt that came from lying or the unacceptable risk of being denounced and abandoning Cosette like he'd abandoned his own sister's children all those years before.

At least he had a portress. He would need to remember to always have a good female servant around for anything that Cosette might need and to try and keep servants who did their job well around for as long as possible so as not to separate Cosette from someone she might grow to care for.

Cosette chanced to glance up and when she saw him her face broke into a huge smile. She gave the bowl one final stir before handing the spoon off to Madame Martin and rushing over to greet him.

Valjean found being greeted by a hug whenever he returned to be quite agreeable and filled him with a warmth that was even stronger than he felt the rest of the time that he spent with Cosette. He wondered if he had ever had that before. If he did then he could not recall it so he supposed that it did not matter. It would have been decades regardless.

"I helped make dinner!" Cosette announced proudly.

Valjean chuckled and ruffled her hair. "I see that you did. How about you go upstairs and wash up and then you can tell me what you did today."

Cosette nodded but then hesitated. "Do you need any more help with anything, Madame Martin?"

The older woman shook her head. "Thank you, dear, but I'm almost done."

Cosette ran upstairs then.

"Thank you for indulging Cosette," Valjean said to Madame Martin once Cosette had gone. "I'm sure that she would have slowed you down."

"Do not worry, Monsieur," Madame Martin assured him. "That child is an absolute angel."

Valjean smiled, always pleased to hear other people appreciating Cosette. She had had far too little appreciation from the Thénardiers and even the ever-constant and limitless love of her mother had been too far away for Cosette to feel.

"And a girl must learn to cook from somewhere," Madame Martin reasoned. "She is already improving a lot."

Valjean tilted his head. "Oh? Then this is not a one-time thing?"

Madame Martine suddenly seemed embarrassed and lowered her eyes. Valjean hated it whenever he provoked that response in people. It was fortunately not often but he did not always understand why it happened. He had noticed that the higher he rose in society the more often this occured.

Thankfully, his portress chose to inform him of why she would not meet his eyes. "Perhaps I should have asked before letting her help. She was just so excited and had nothing else to do while waiting for you to return that I…"

When it became clear that she was not going to go on, Valjean replied, "I am not upset, Madame. I was merely surprised because usually when I return home dinner is already prepared and so I do have the opportunity to see Cosette at work."

Madame Martine frowned. "I had noticed that. Did I fall behind? My apologizes, Monsieur Madeleine."

Valjean shook his head. "No, not at all. Today I merely finished my work a little early and so have arrived before my usual time. I appreciate you taking the time to occupy Cosette and teach her something but can such a small child really be useful? I do not wish for her to be a burden to you."

"Oh, she isn't!" Madame Martin hurried to assure him. "It reminds me of teaching my girls, to be honest. Children helping may take a little extra time but that's true no matter what age they are and she has to learn from somewhere."

"That is true," Valjean reasoned. "I have never learned to cook myself and would have no idea of how to begin teaching Cosette so I thank you for your efforts."

Madame Martin's ears turned a delicate shade of pink. "Oh, thank you, Monsieur. It is no trouble, as I said. Little Cosette is an excellent student and I make sure not to let her near knives or the stove at her age."

That had not even occurred to him as a potential problem and, now that it had, he was grateful that it had been addressed so quickly.

He exchanged a few more pleasantries with his portress before going upstairs to see Cosette.

She was lying down next to the bookcase and carefully examining one of his books. As he got closer, his heart swelled to realize that she had chosen the Bible though of course she could not read it. Perhaps she had recognized it, though, when he had read from it.

When she heard him come in, she quickly shut the book and put it back in its place, looking like she did not know whether she was allowed to have done that or not.

"It is alright, Cosette," Valjean assured her, going to sit down in his chair. "You may look at whichever of my books you want whenever I am not reading them myself as long as you promise to be careful."

Cosette nodded, looking so serious that it made him want to laugh. He refrained, however, as there was little a child disliked more than being laughed at.

It occurred to him that, aside from the Bible which he read every night before going to bed and read to Cosette when they returned from Mass on Sunday, he had not done much reading these past few weeks. He had just not had time. But while he did miss spending time with his safe and solitary friends, he could not regret this bright and lively addition to his life that God has seen fit to send him. He wished that this change had come from less tragic circumstances but that was not entirely God's doing and he knew that any child who was alone was some form of tragic circumstance and he could not bring a child into his life and all the – admittedly lessoned – risks associated with it unless they were alone and desperate.

He wondered if anyone had been kind to his own nieces and nephews when they had not accompanied his sister to Paris and been alone and desperate. Assuming that they had survived the five years since his arrest by that point…It did no good to dwell on it. Somehow, however, no matter how many times he told himself this, seeing Cosette always brought back those old memories and worries that would do nobody any good and that he could never even share. Most people could not hear of it. Bamatabois would not care. He could not burden a child like that, especially one he had already wronged as much as Gervais who, despite the years and his fierce independence, was still very much a child.

Just the same, while he knew that no good would come of thinking of them and most of his memories of them had faded away over the years, lost somewhere among the lashes and the chains, he did not want to allow what little remained to disappear as well.

He was still looking for them, though he had long since given up the notion of actually finding them, and it really did feel like they had just blown away in the wind. He had failed them enough as it was (had always been failing them, living on the edge of starvation at the best of times) and would not do them the further disservice of not remembering what he could.

Valjean blinked and came back to himself as Cosette climbed onto his lap. She was good at bringing him back to the present when he got lost in the memories of time gone by.

"I want to learn how to read," she announced.

"Oh?"

Cosette nodded seriously. "I have been thinking about it and I want to learn. I like playing with Catherine and helping Madame Martin but I think books might help, too, when I'm waiting for you."

Valjean nodded. Naturally it had always been the plan, ever since he knew of Cosette's existence, that she would learn how to read even before he had known that she would be given over to his keeping. He was just glad that Cosette was so eager for the knowledge. "Well of course you shall have to learn how to read! You shall need to write, as well."

Cosette looked expectantly at him and he was not quite sure what it was that she was looking to hear.

"School should be starting up again soon and then you can start going to class," Valjean told her. "You will be able to meet boys and girls your own age and make friends."

"Friends," Cosette said slowly, unhappily. "You mean with people like Zelma and Ponine?"

Valjean had no idea what a 'Zelma' or a 'Ponine' was. "I do not think so, my child. Who are Zelma and Ponine?"

Cosette frowned and snuggled against him. "They're Madame Thénardiers little ladies. They did not like me. They used to tell my mist…Madame Thénardier when I touched their doll and then she would beat me."

Valjean closed his eyes and ran a soothing hand over Cosette's arm. He did not understand how people could be like that. Even at his lowest, even when he had robbed a bishop who had tried to save him and a child who had done nothing, he would never have attacked a child like that. But she was gone from there now.

The only concern was the other children. He could not take them as well, they already had a mother and a father. They were cruel to Cosette as well and he would not subject her back to that. Perhaps it was not their fault that they learned the lessons of their elders and they could be taught differently in time but in the meantime it would just cause more pain for this darling child that had seen more than her fair share of suffering and he would nont stand for them to mistreat her while learning to be better. He did worry at what being raised by such monsters, even monsters that seemed to love them and treat them well, would do to children born innocent. They would not have an easy time growing up to not be monsters themselves.

But they had parents and he could not take them from them and could not raise every child in France.

"Listen very carefully to me, Cosette," Valjean said, quietly but intensely, shifting the girl on his lap so that she was face-to-face with him. "I cannot change what happened in the past but I will never let anyone hurt you like that again."

He wanted to tell her that he would never allow her to be hurt again as long as he was living but he could not. Pain was a natural part of life. Not the pain of Toulon, the pain of the Thénardiers, the pain of abandonment, the pain of dying but little things. She would have the pain of someone who was her friend deciding that she didn't like her anymore. She would have the pain of a boy she liked not liking her back. She would have the pain of looking in the mirror and not liking what she saw. She would have the pain of never having her mother again though that was not such a little thing.

But he would not let her fact the sort of pain she had known before, the sort of pain that had once been inescapable for him.

It took him a moment to realize that little Cosette was trembling and for a moment he feared that he had said the wrong thing. Sometimes he felt so bad at this. What had he once said to the other children, his sister's children? He did not speak to them much, he thought, too busy resenting his situation (oh to think that later he would long for that same thing he had been so desperate to escape!) and too tired from working too hard for too little and taking another step towards ruination and starvation. And even if he had, it was very nearly thirty years ago.

Then she said, "Do you promise?"

He kissed her gently on the hand and she did not pull away as she usually did. "I promise."

She smiled then, brightly, and he marveled in the resiliency of children. Happiness truly was their natural state, as he had enjoyed helping Cosette to come to discover.

"Friends, Cosette, are nothing like that," Valjean assured her though what did he know of friends? When had he last had one? When had he last had the time or the daring? Perhaps he could risk it now. Those were thoughts for another time. "Friends are people who are nice to you and play with you and you like being around."

Cosette considered that. "Friends are like you then, Papa?"

Valjean smiled at that. "Yes, perhaps a little. But I am your father and friends tend to be people that are not your family that you like. And when you are a child your friends tend to be other children."

And yet she still hesitated. "The only other children that I ever knew were Ponine and Zelma. There was the baby, too, but I didn't see him very much."

"The other children will not be like that," Valjean told her. "They will not be allowed to be like that."

"Alright," Cosette said but it was clear that she was having a difficult time believing him.

"You are a wonderful little girl and the other children will be very lucky to have the chance to be your friend," Valjean pressed.

Cosette looked a little more confident at this and Valjean resolved to keep telling her that every day until he could prove it to her.

"But school doesn't start right away, you said," Cosette reminded him.

"Hm? Oh, no, not just yet," he confirmed.

"I don't want to wait to learn to read," Cosette said shyly, looking a little worried at her own insistence.

Valjean could never deny Cosette anything and certainly not something as innocent and important as learning how to read.

"I've never taught anyone how to read before," he mused. He was not entirely sure how. He himself had learned to read around fifteen years ago but he had not been paying attention to how that was done, too concerned was he with learning as much as he could as fast as he could so that he could try and inflict just a fraction of what had been done to him onto an unsuspecting and largely innocent world. He did not like to think of it but he would have to if he wanted to have any sort of idea of how to teach a child.

It amused him and made him smile to think that he had only bothered to learn to read in the first place because he had wanted to inflict pain and yet all he had ever done with the knowledge was create a business to help the entire community and become mayor to better the lives of those around him and now he was going to be teaching a child to read. What purer and nobler thing was there to do with literacy?

Cosette looked up at him hopefully. "Before? Does that mean that you will teach me?"

Fantine had never known how to read. That was one of the reasons that her life had been ruined. If she had known how to read then she would have been able to write her own letters to the Thénardiers and those townspeople who had sought only to indulge their own curiosity and had surely had no malicious intent would not have been able to find out about Cosette and unwittingly send Fantine to her grave. Fantine never complained of her own fate, not as long as he had known her. All she had wanted, no matter how far she had to fall to achieve it, was for Cosette to have better. It would not be hard to give Cosette a better life than Fantine given what desperation she had had to turn to at the end but that was not enough. She deserved a good life, a proper one, not merely one that was better.

And then his family had never known how to read and it had only made their lives more difficult. It had been that he had never even fully understood the difficulty that it was to not be able to read until suddenly that difficulty was removed.

The school that he had built was a good school and he had full faith in it. But suddenly he knew that he did not want to make Cosette wait one minute longer to receive this precious gift.

He seemed to recall that the first thing to do was to write out the alphabet and make her understand that certain letters corresponded to certain sounds.

"I will teach you," Valjean decided, standing up. "Right after dinner we will get started."


	12. Chapter 12

Valjean knew that he was not the best teacher. He was patient, certainly, but inexperienced and untrained. He would like to think that he was not the worst teacher, however, and slowly but surely Cosette's reading abilities improved (so he must be doing something right) until one day it was time for her to go to school.

She clutched tightly at his hand on their walk over. He knew that many of the local children walked to school alone but it was Cosette's first day and she was nervous so he intended to accompany her.

If he was being perfectly honest then he intended to continue to accompany her every day unless he was called out of town for whatever reason (he tried to ignore the growing urge to seek out Champmathieu). He was sure that at some point she would grow enough that it would be silly to walk her to school but he couldn't imagine it. There was also the possibility that, as painfully grateful as Cosette was to have him here right now, one day she might be embarrassed to have him take her. He did not think – or rather, he hoped it would not be – that it would be because she was ashamed of him but that she was embarrassed at the thought that being accompanied to school when others her age were not would make her look like a child.

But for now she looked like she might just stand where she was forever if not outright running back home and hiding behind Madame Martin if he was not beside her and he took heart in that. Was it strange to feel a pang of loss for the present since it would inevitably be lost, years and years for now? He found it inexplicable and yet there it was.

"Will you promise that you will still help me read?" Cosette asked him again. It was sweet how she would believe anything he said as long as he promised. He was not sure that he would not end up letting her down someday but he resolved to do his best not to.

Whether or not he would still find the time to work with her on her reading had been a big concern of hers ever since she had become worried that she would not be good enough at reading by the time that school started. He had explained that not everyone was going to know how to read at all since she would not be the only new student but she still fretted.

He had never attended school himself and, though he had spent a decent amount of money improving the schooling here and in better paying the teachers, he did not really know all that much about it. The children would have to be broken up into groups based on how long they had been in school or how much they knew or something like that. Would they stay in the same groups for all of their subjects or would someone who was good at reading but bad at writing be in two different groups? What would the other students do while another group was being instructed? It occurred to him that there was a great deal about schooling that he did not know but perhaps should. It had never really seemed important before Cosette but he was finding that that was true with a lot of things.

He had known that some things would change, certainly, with the addition of a new person into his life – especially someone who could not be kept at arm's length like a daughter – but he had rather underestimated how much it would change.

"Of course I will," Valjean assured her, wondering if Cosette would need to go with the other new students (some of whom would be younger than she) or if there was some sort of test to see which group she belonged in.

It may just be a father's pride when he thought that she was an exceptionally bright child (really, what did he know of such things?) but he could say with complete objectivity that Cosette was a hard worker. She genuinely wanted to learn and it made him glad that she was going to take full advantage of this opportunity denied to so many. It was his goal that one day no one in Montreuil who wanted to learn would be rebuffed but though he had made great strides towards this it was not yet a reality.

"And you're sure I'll make friends?" Cosette pressed.

How could he promise such a thing? He hoped that she would, certainly, and remembered distantly that most children had little trouble making friends. Those who were too different did not, always. There was a boy in his village who was missing a finger but had not seemed to have lost it in an accident or something, just never had it, and he had been teased most mercilessly. Cosette being the child of a woman widely known to have fallen to prostitution as well as the fact that she had no experience with children before, being treated as a slave in Montfermeil, did make her different but he rather hoped that that would not be enough to cause them to ostracize her. Her being the child of the mayor was another difference but not one that he thought would harm her. Perhaps it would even be enough to make up for the others.

He rather felt that girls that age were kinder than boys so Cosette attending a school just for girls should make things easier.

Cosette was still looking worriedly at him.

"You will make lots of friends," he said at last. "Just smile and be friendly and you will be fine."

A small smile crept over her face then.

"Exactly like that," Valjean said encouragingly.

They reached the school and walked past the children playing outside. Cosette returned their curious stares with one of her own and drew a little closer to him. The schoolmaster was inside.

He had heard that it was difficult to get a good teacher who knew more than what he was teaching the students but, strangely, he had never had this problem. Perhaps good teachers had been attracted to Montreuil rather than other places by the extra salary he ensured that they received but if they were going to be teaching anyway and were good for the children then what was the harm in being rewarded for it? It was why he had started giving them a salary more than twice what they were given by the government in addition to their official pay in the first place.

"Monsieur le Maire!" Durand exclaimed, rising at once to greet them.

Valjean nodded at him. "Monsieur Durand."

"I had heard that your daughter would be beginning school today," Durand said, peering down at Cosette. "This is she?"

Valjean nodded again. "I do hope that she will have a good experience here."

"Oh, I'm sure she'll fit right in," Durand told him. "We are expecting quite a few new girls today and the older girls always love it when there's some fresh face to liven the place up."

"Will you be alright here if I go?" Valjean asked Cosette seriously. He had work that he really should be doing but there would be time for that later, after he made sure that Cosette would be fine. "Or would you like me to stay for awhile?"

Cosette looked very tempted to ask him to stay. Finally, she said, "I will be fine, I think."

"I'm glad to hear it," Durand told her. "Just go right outside and play with the other girls and then, in a few minutes, I'll call the class in and we can begin."

Valjean let Cosette walk out ahead of him.

"I will make sure that she is well-looked after, Monsieur," Durand promised. He would likely not be so eager to look out for one little girl if her father were not the man paying him most of his salary but since it was what it was he merely nodded and thanked him.

Valjean kept his distance as he left, not wanting to interfere, and watched as Cosette hesitantly approached two friendly-looking girls who were picking blades of grass. Once he saw that they seemed to welcome her into their group, he left. What he really wanted to do was stay and watch but he knew that if he gave into that temptation then he could very well be waiting out there all day.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He could not take the time to pick Cosette up from school (though he did send someone to bring her home) but he make sure to leave a little early so that he could be there sooner for Cosette and to find out how her first day had gone.

Cosette was chattering excitedly to Madame Martin as she helped prepare dinner again (this time she was helping to crack some eggs) but she broke off and ran to him. When she flung her arms around him, he felt a little wetness on his back and concluded that she must have had some of the egg on her hands when she hugged him. When she drew back, he saw that she was correct.

Madame Martin also noticed this and looked like she wanted to say something but would defer to how he wished to handle it. Well, what was there to handle? People always made messes when they were first learning to do things and children naturally made more messes than adults. She had meant no harm, quite the opposite, and it was nothing that a proper washing would not take care of.

"Perhaps you might want to wash up and be careful not to touch anything else until you do," he suggested mildly.

Cosette looked puzzled until she glanced down at her hands and then she flushed. "I got egg all over you!"

"It's not very much," Valjean was quick to reassure her.

Cosette still looked a little upset but just nodded and hurried off to do just that.

"My apologies, Monsieur," Madame Martin said, bowing her head.

"She is cooking and eggs can be very messy," Valjean said simply.

"She is not applying enough force and, while the eggshell does not fall into the food to need to be picked out, she only manages to produce a small crack in the egg so it gets all over her fingers and she must pour the yolk into the bowl," Madame Martin explained. "She will get better."

"I leave it in your capable hands," Valjean told her before going to locate his daughter.

She was inspecting her wet hands very carefully before she finally seemed satisfied and dried them on the towel.

When she caught him looking, she said, "I wanted to make sure I got it all off."

"That's very thoughtful of you, Cosette," Valjean replied, smiling. "Washing your hands properly is always a good skill to have."

Even now, with everything Valjean was doing to get her more accustomed to praise, it took so very little to make her light up like that. It did his heart good but it also concerned him a little. Did this mean that there were still problems that had to be address? Was this just a character trait? If it was then what might it mean one day when a boy said nice things to her?

But those were worries for another day.

For now, Cosette was smiling sunnily at him and it brightened the room.

Valjean took a seat in his chair and gestured for Cosette to come sit on his lap.

She willingly obliged and Valjean absently smoothed her hair back as he asked, "So how was your first day of school?"

"It was really nice!" Cosette said happily. "Monsieur Durand said that I knew a lot for not having gone to school before."

"You're very smart, Cosette," Valjean told her, smiling as well.

"Smart or not you helped," Cosette said reasonably. "So thank you!"

"You've already thanked me quite a few times," Valjean said, amused. "You thank me every time we sit down to work on your reading."

"You can never say thank you too many times," Cosette informed him importantly.

"No, I suppose not," Valjean agreed, chuckling.

"I didn't get put with the other new kids," Cosette continued. "I was bigger than them anyway. They were nice but I like the new people I'm with, too."

"That's very good."

"There was one thing that was a little strange, though," Cosette said slowly, biting her lower lip.

"And what was that?" he asked her, shifting his weight a little to get more comfortable.

"Monsieur Durand was really nice and always made sure that I knew what was going on but…" Cosette trailed off.

"But what?" Valjean prompted patiently. He hoped that it would not be a serious problem although since Cosette had prefaced her statement with compliments, he rather doubted that it would be.

"But he kept calling me 'Euphrasie'," Cosette said, wrinkling her nose.

Valjean laughed at that and lightly tapped Cosette on the nose with his index finger. "Is that all? Your name is Euphrasie, my child."

"I guess, a little," Cosette said reluctantly. "But nobody ever calls me that. I don't think anyone has ever called me that except for Monsieur Durand. I did not even know that that was my name until I saw Mama again."

Valjean automatically tensed at that, keeping an eye out for any sign of sorrow or distress at the mention of Fantine, however casual it was. Fantine's child seemed perfectly content, however. Perhaps enough time had passed that the wounds were starting to heal. She certainly cried less, these days, but he had not wanted to assume. As glad as he was that Cosette was evidently feeling better, he did worry, a little, that this might be the beginning of forgetting Fantine.

Well, he would just have to make sure that that didn't happen.

"Do you not like being called 'Euphrasie'?" he asked her.

Cosette frowned. "I never really thought about it. It's a pretty name but…it's not my name. And you can say that it is but I don't think of me when I think 'Euphrasie.' I think of me when I think 'Cosette.'"

Valjean nodded knowingly. "You're out of practice being called Euphrasie, if you were ever in practice." He knew a little of what that was like. He had had the biggest shock of his life when Javert had flung the words 'Jean Valjean' at him months ago, only to tell him that he was not, in fact, there to accuse him after all. It had been years since somebody had actually called him by name. Perhaps the bishop had been the last one to do so. That would be fitting, he thought.

"I tried to tell him that I'm Cosette but he didn't believe me," Cosette continued, a little unhappily. "He said that the records said that my name was Euphrasie and you could not get Cosette from Euphrasie and I shouldn't cause trouble."

"I can see where he's coming from," Valjean began.

Cosette's face fell and Valjean briefly squeezed her hand.

"People have to go by their names, you understand. Imagine that there was a little girl named Catherine and Catherine did not want to be called that. Instead she wanted to be called…" he trailed off and looked meaningfully at Cosette.

"Napoleon!" Cosette cried, giggling.

Valjean smiled at that. "Instead Catherine wanted to be called Napoleon. Should Monsieur Durand call her Napoleon?"

Cosette shook her head.

"But in this case, it's different. Here you're not just making up a name but trying to tell him what you are really called," Valjean concluded. "I shall explain it when I walk you to school tomorrow."

"Thank you, Papa," Cosette said charmingly, leaning back against him. "I knew that you would fix it!"

Valjean was touched by this vote of confidence and pleased that he was managing not to disappoint this child who now depended on him. "Did you make any friends?"

Cosette nodded excitedly. "I did! All of the girls were really nice but I like Lucie and Daphné and Manon the best. They're in my group and we had lunch together and we picked flowers and put them in our hair."

"I'm sure you looked lovely," Valjean said, easily imagining Cosette running and laughing with the other girls and sticking flowers in her hair.

"I don't know about that but the other girls looked really pretty so I must have looked nice, too," Cosette said, looking down. Cosette was still not a pretty child but she was growing closer every day. It made no difference to him, of course, but he would not like to see Cosette hurt.

"What else did you do?" he asked her.

"They were really impressed that I already knew how to read even though I had never gone to school before," Cosette continued eagerly. "They kept asking me why I hadn't gone and I didn't know what to tell them so I just said that there wasn't a school where I lived before."

On the one hand, he didn't want Cosette to have to talk about her time in Montfermeil with the Thénardiers. On the other, he did not want her to get into the habit of lying. He knew full well just how impossible a habit it could be to break. "Was there a school in Montfermeil?"

Cosette tilted her head back, thinking. At last she said, "I do not know. It would not have mattered if there was. Unless they were paid for me to go, I would not have gone."

Valjean gave her a quick hug and then asked her another question about her friends.


	13. Chapter 13

Javert was enjoying some rare peace and taking the opportunity to fill out his reports unimpeded. It was not that Montreuil had an exceptionally large crime rate, far from it, but his coworkers could be rather…exuberant when there was nothing pressing going on and that did make it difficult to concentrate. He had not yet given in to the temptation to take his paperwork home with him because he knew that that would probably eventually lead to him working in his every waking hour and he was assured by pretty much everybody that that was not a good idea. It was close, however, and so he compromised by spending far longer at the prefecture than anybody else.

Today it was quiet, however, and Javert was vaguely wondering what he should do if all of his work was finished before his shift ended. Should he go out on patrol again? Stay here and go and stare at the criminals sitting in jail awaiting transport to Arras? They had two currently. One was another prostitute who had attacked Bamatabois. One would think that he would learn to be more careful and stop landing himself in these kinds of situations but evidently he had not. She had been to prison before and seemed indifferent to the prospect, not having a child like Cosette to watch over as Fantine had. Since Madeleine was a far more suitable caretaker to a child than those thieves at the inn (he would not be surprised to hear of their arrest soon) or a prostitute like Fantine, that had actually worked out for the best for the innocent child as well as the law. This woman had actually managed to break Bamatabois' arm, which he insisted on complaining about at every opportunity, and was not even a little repentant.

The other had killed a man in a drunken brawl and seemed to be shocked by the whole situation. Javert could acknowledge that the man hadn't meant to kill anybody and didn't even seem to really remember what had happened but nobody had forced him to drink as much as he had nor to pick a fight. Drunken decisions were still decisions and still punishable by the law.

Suddenly, his own decision about what to do when his rapidly-dwindling pile of paperwork was completed was taken out of his hands when Madeleine rushed in, his eyes wild and his cravat completely crooked. Javert briefly shut his eyes as he quashed the familiar impulse to straighten it (Madeleine, being Madeleine, would probably allow it even if he thought it odd but he could only imagine how ill-dressed strangers on the street would react to such a thing).

"Yes, Monsieur le Maire?" he asked politely, folding his hands in front of him.

"Cosette," Madeleine said in a rush. "I was at my office when my portress sent word that Cosette had not been at the school when she came at the usual time to pick her up."

Javert rather felt that Madeleine was being too overprotective of the child. Girls and boys younger than she managed to get to and from school on their own just fine. Though he had heard of abductions or murders of children in Toulon or at his first post, he could not recall any incidents of the sort happening during his tenure here in Montreuil. Still, there was nothing wrong with this instinct of his and if Cosette's behavior had deviated from her normal conduct then perhaps he was about to see such a case unfold here in the worst possible way.

He immediately stood. "And you would like to enlist police aid in locating the child?"

Madeleine nodded. "Yes. I already searched a little near the school before it occurred to me to ask for your help."

The help of the police or Javert's in particular?

"Well I will take some of my men and search for her," Javert informed him. "You should return home in case she returns there."

But Madeleine shook his head. "Madame Martin is there right now. If Cosette returns, she will be there to greet her. I can't just sit there helplessly waiting; I have to try and find her myself. I cannot believe that she would just wander off without telling anybody. Cosette is a good girl."

"Of course she is," Javert agreed in an effort to calm the other man down. Madeleine would be at best useless and at worse actually hinder the investigation if he was not able to quell his panic. "I will send you out with one of my men."

Madeleine nodded, making a visible effort to calm down. "Thank you."

"It is my duty," Javert said simply.

"I know. But not everyone does their duty and few with such zest as you. So thank you."

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Javert assigned his men partners, leaving only a few men back at the station to work and to be there in case anyone else needed assistance, and then set off alone as the man that he would have partnered with he had had to assign to Madeleine. He gave everyone an area of the town to search so that they would not miss any area or go over some places too many times. He did, however, assign a pair to re-search the areas that Madeleine had already checked because he was a panicking father and not trained in such things.

Javert moved through his section at a moderate speed, taking care to look everywhere a child of Cosette's size could conceivably hide but not spending too much time in any one place. He had been searching for perhaps half an hour when he finally found her lying by the riverbank and giggling with four girls that looked to be about her age.

The other girls, when they saw him, all drew back and stopped laughing immediately. Javert wondered if this meant that their parents were hiding some unlawful activity or if they were just naturally cautious about members of the police. Cosette, however, had no such wariness and cheerfully stood up to greet him, wiping the grass off of her dress as she did so.

"Hello, Inspector Javert!" she said brightly. "What are you doing here? Are you looking for a criminal? Can I help?"

Javert took a moment to process the sheer absurdity of the request.

"No you cannot help," he said automatically and then paused. "And I am not chasing a criminal, anyway. Just a very foolish little girl who has her father very worried."

Cosette looked blankly at him .

"I think he means you," one of the other girls whispered to her.

"Really?" Cosette asked, looking surprised. "Do you mean me?"

Javert fought the rather unprofessional urge to roll his eyes at her. "That would be a safe guess, yes." He turned to the other girls. "You, all of you, go home right now."

He had no way of knowing whether they actually would but they quickly said their goodbyes to Cosette and scampered off so it was not his concern. Perhaps their parents were worried about them and perhaps not but they did not come to the prefecture to find their daughters (and, as people who were not the mayor, their concerns over such a simple matter were far less pressing) and so they could take care of themselves.

Cosette was frowning up at him, still clearly confused.

"Why were you not waiting to be picked up after school today?" Javert demanded, feeling for the first time in his life strangely like a parent and rather resenting it.

"Monsieur Durand got sick and so we got out really early," Cosette explained to him. "I knew that Papa was busy and I thought that Madame Martin would be busy, too, and not want to have to watch me, too, and my friends wanted to come play here. I didn't think it would upset anybody." She looked down at the ground.

"Why did you not tell anybody where you were going?" Javert pressed.

"I did not think anybody would worry," Cosette said quietly. "I used to go out all the time by myself before I came here. I had to. I was always fine."

It did not surprise Javert in the slightest to learn this of the Thénardiers. "Your father is a far better person and more able caretaker than your previous guardians."

"I know that!" Cosette assured him, her eyes huge. "I just did not think that he would worry about something like that. I've been going out by myself for as long as I can remember."

"And you didn't think that his refusal to let you walk to or from school by yourself meant that maybe it would worry him?" Javert asked pointedly.

Cosette hesitated. "No?"

Javert sighed. She had broken no laws. She was a child. The past could not be changed. "Do not do something like this again. Your father has most of the police out looking for you instead of arresting criminals."

"I'm sorry," Cosette said contritely. She seemed to mean it so Javert nodded at her.

"Let's get back to the prefecture and then we can send a message to your father letting him know that we found you," he told her.

Cosette nodded back at him and made several futile attempts to slip her hand into his.

Finally, she gave up and asked, "Do you like arresting criminals?"

"It is my duty."

"But do you like it?" she pressed.

Javert thought about it. "I suppose I do."

"Why?" she asked.

"What does it matter?" Javert countered.

"Because I want to know," Cosette said as if it were obvious.

Deciding that it would be easier to just answer her than to have to listen to her attempts to persuade him, Javert replied, "I like to keep the streets safe for nice law-abiding citizens. I like to make sure that people do not flout the law. I like knowing that I am doing my duty and doing it well. I like to pit myself against a criminal and come out victorious."

"Why do you like the last one?" Cosette asked curiously.

Javert valiantly resisted the urge to glare at her but did narrow his eyes a little.

Cosette did not seem impressed.

"My job is not just about the law," Javert tried to explain. "It is about the people, too. Every time there is a crime, I have to figure out who did it and to catch them. Sometimes it is obvious who did it but that doesn't mean that it will be easy to find them. Some criminals, especially people who commit crimes all the time, are very good at hiding and I have to find them so I can arrest them."

Cosette was quiet for a blessed moment as she digested this. "So it's like a game. You have to be smarter than the criminals so you can arrest them."

"I wouldn't call it a 'game'," Javert said a bit stiffly. "It is far more serious than that. But yes, I do have to be smarter than the criminals. Sometimes that is not hard. Sometimes the criminal is stupid or careless or just has very bad luck and it is easy to catch them. Sometimes a criminal can escape for years."

"But you always catch them in the end, right?" Cosette asked worriedly.

Another man might have hesitated to frighten the child but Javert saw no reason to coddle her. "Not always."

Cosette bit her lip. "But most times?"

Javert considered. "I believe so."

She relaxed a little. "Can you tell me about a criminal?"

That sounded like the sort of thing that Madeleine would not want him to talk about. He probably told her how sad criminals were and that they only turned to crime because they were desperately poor. In some cases, it might even be true that if their lives were easier then the criminals would be honest men. It did not excuse anything, however, and perhaps it would be good for little Cosette to get a more realistic (and frankly sane) look at the world lest she grow up thinking that any ill-fortune she might experience, as if Madeleine would allow that, was an excuse to turn to crime or she should try to help dangerous criminals.

There was one man that, even after all these months, was still on his mind. It was not the man himself but the fact that he had associated this convict with Madeleine that meant that every time he saw the man he thought, at least in passing, of Valjean. He had meant it when he said that he no longer harbored any illusions about Valjean and Madeleine being one and the same but the association had yet to completely fade for him.

"There was once a very poor man," Javert began. "His name was Jean Valjean. He was not a complete idiot but you would never have been able to tell from his crime."

"What did he do?" Cosette asked, intrigued.

"He waited until it was night and punched the baker's window. He grabbed a loaf of bread and he ran away," Javert narrated.

"Why?" Cosette asked him.

"You need to stop asking me why," Javert informed her.

"But you don't tell me enough," Cosette protested.

"Most people who steal food tend to do so because they are hungry," Javert said indifferently.

Cosette frowned, a knowing look coming into her eyes. A child whose mother went to such desperate and, more importantly, legal lengths to provide for her shouldn't know hunger. "But he was hungry. How can you be mad at someone for being hungry?"

"It was not that he was hungry it was that he stole," Javert said curtly. "There must have been another way. He could have asked for the food or borrowed something from someone or even just waited until he could afford to buy it himself. It's not easy for someone to starve to death, Cosette."

She looked unconvinced. "Still-"

"Still," he interrupted, "do you really believe that getting rid of your hunger right then is worth going to prison for years and years?"

Cosette quickly shook her head.

"Good," Javert said, pleased that she wasn't a completely lost cause. "Can you tell me why what Valjean did was stupid?"

"Glass is sharp and so his hand was probably bleeding," Cosette replied so promptly that Javert could not help but imagine just how she had come to learn this. "And it makes a really loud noise. And he only stole one loaf of bread."

Javert just shook his head at this. "Technically, you are correct. On a practical level the noise from the glass breaking attracted a lot of attention and led to Valjean's arrest. He was also bleeding so when he was caught, he couldn't pretend it wasn't him though he threw the loaf away so even if he had escaped it all would have been for nothing. And since he was starving, only one loaf likely would not have been enough but that part is not important. Even had he not been caught, stealing is wrong. What did that poor baker do to deserve having his window broken and his bread stolen?"

"Nothing," Cosette replied after a moment.

"Exactly. And then Valjean was sentenced to five years in Toulon," Javert continued. "Do you know what Toulon is?"

Cosette shook her head.

"It is a terrible place that only the worst criminals have to go to," Javert lectured. "I myself was a guard there for a few years to make sure that no one escapes or causes problems. The prisoners have to do heavy labor for most of the day almost every day and they get paid very little. They get hurt whenever they do something bad. Many criminals try to die in Toulon."

Cosette looked horrified. "That is terrible! And that man who stole the bread and broke the window was one of the worst criminals?"

"He is according to the law," Javert said simply. "And we must all trust in the law otherwise we would live in a society where bad people did bad things to people and no one could stop them."

Cosette shivered. "That would be bad."

"Besides, his crime was not the worst," Javert conceded. "That is why he only got five years instead of ten or twenty or even the rest of his life."

"So he went to Toulon and everything was really terrible and then five years later he got to leave?" Cosette asked him.

Javert couldn't help himself; he snorted.

Cosette looked affronted.

"He would have gotten out but, as I said, Valjean was not an idiot but he often acted like one. He attempted to escape," Javert informed her.

"I think that that makes sense," Cosette told him seriously. "You said that Toulon is really, really terrible so why wouldn't people try to leave?"

"If it were as simple as just leaving then perhaps the criminal element would be smart to try," Javert admitted. "If they even just got a beating on their return then I could still see a reason to attempt it. But that is not all that it is. It is easy enough to try and escape Toulon, especially with all of the convicts helping each other, but it is much harder for someone to stay escaped."

"Why?" Cosette asked yet again.

"The uniform the convicts wear stands out and everyone recognizes them as being convicts," Javert informed her. "They have shorn hair and long, unruly beards. There is also a wild and haunted look to them that makes it really obvious that they are escaped convicts. Not only does every police officer in the country look for the man that escapes but every normal person who sees them knows what they are and reports them. To successfully escape, they have to stay away from everyone and try to avoid the people looking for them. We have a pretty good idea at this point of the common paths that escaped criminals take and we search them up and down. And then they also need money and supplies to try and disappear. Most cannot manage it. Valjean couldn't."

"What else besides being beaten makes it stupid to try and escape Toulon?" Cosette asked, looking a little haunted herself. "I think being beaten is bad enough."

"Criminals get used to being beaten and it is not good enough to stop them from trying to escape," Javert said. "It is too much to hope that they will all gracefully accept their punishment like honest men as if they were honest men they would not be there in the first place. Attempting to escape adds three more years to your sentence. Attempting to escape and then fighting the people who try to take you back adds five years."

Cosette counted on her fingers. "So Valjean had to do eight years? Or ten?"

"He would have had eight if he had stopped there," Javert said grimly.

Cosette looked stunned. "He tried to escape again?"

"Yes," Javert confirmed. "And again and again. Once he tried to resist and three times he didn't. How many years is that, Cosette?"

It took her a moment but at last she breathed, "Nineteen years!"

"He was released around the time you were born, October of 1815," Javert said. "He was a very dangerous man and so he was on parole forever."

"A dangerous man?" Cosette asked, confused. "I know that stealing is bad and breaking a window is also bad but you said that he was hungry. How does that make him dangerous?"

"Perhaps the man who was arrested was not particularly dangerous," Javert said, shrugging. "I would not know. I did not meet him then. But by the time he was released, he had become very dangerous indeed."

Cosette's brow furrowed. "Because of all the time in that terrible Toulon?"

"Very likely," Javert agreed.

"Why have a prison that takes non-dangerous people and makes them dangerous?" Cosette asked reasonably.

"It's not supposed to make people dangerous," Javert explained. "Personally, I believe it is the influence of the other convicts. They are all terrible influences on each other and make each other worse. But what is the alternative? We cannot possible prevent the convicts from ever interacting. Then they would not be able to be useful by working, and we need their labor, and we do not have the room or resources to manage it. It would also be much like solitary confinement and prisoners have a difficult time being left alone for too long."

"I still don't like it," Cosette said eventually.

"Neither do they," Javert said dryly. "That is another reason not to break the law. Women do not have hard labor in prison but it is still a very bad experience for them and something you do not want to have to face."

Cosette nodded vehemently. "What happened to the man?"

"What man?" Javert asked. "Oh, Valjean. Well he was on parole for five days. Then he was arrested for stealing some very valuable silver from a respected and much-loved bishop. This bishop was so good that he even let Valjean stay the night when no one else would let him stay. And before you start feeling sorry for him, know that they were right to do so because Valjean clearly would have just stolen from them as well."

Cosette gasped. "Why would he steal from someone who was nice to him?"

"Instead of stealing from one of the ones who were not?" Javert asked rhetorically. "Perhaps because he had more of an opportunity to steal from a man who inexplicably trusted him and whose roof he was sleeping under. And as I said, he was a very dangerous man at this point and did not care if he hurt innocent people."

"He hurt the bishop?" Cosette asked worriedly.

"He did not," Javert assured her. "But if the bishop had woken up, who knows what might have happened?" His honestly compelled him to elaborate further. "When Valjean was brought back, the bishop claimed that he had given Valjean the silver as a gift and then gave him yet more silver and so the gendarmes were forced to let him go."

"But you don't believe the bishop?" Cosette asked him. "Why would he lie to protect someone who stole from him?"

"The bishop was a very kind and forgiving man, much like your father," Javert explained. "He probably thought that he was helping this man. Valjean had been in prison for nineteen years after all and was out on parole for less than a week. If the bishop had not denied having been robbed then Valjean would have spent the rest of his life in Toulon."

Cosette shuddered. "That's horrible!"

"It is," Javert agreed. "And exactly what he should have thought of before he stole the silver. He was no naïve man who did not know what the punishment for being caught was and he was never very successful at being a criminal."

"But you don't know that he did steal the silver," Cosette pointed out. "I think a man that would lie about being robbed and give away even more silver to save a criminal would also be willing to just give all that silver away in the first place."

"Perhaps you are right," Javert admitted grudgingly. "But I believe that the theft was more likely."

"And then what happened?" Cosette asked. "Did Valjean steal again?"

"He did," Javert confirmed. "I do not know how much or how often but less than a year ago he stole some apples and was sent back to Toulon for the rest of his life."

"Maybe he didn't steal anything between those two times," Cosette said hopefully. "Why would he need to steal food if he had all that silver?"

"He probably wasted the money," Javert said dismissively. "He was so poor before being in prison where there was no money for nearly two decades that it wouldn't surprise me at all if he squandered it. And I highly doubt he did not steal anything else because immediately after being released by the gendarmes in 1815 he broke parole and disappeared."

"And that's bad?" Cosette guessed.

Javert nodded seriously. "It is very bad. The reason that convicts are put on parole in the first place instead of just turned loose upon society is so that we can keep an eye on them and make sure that they are not committing more crimes. Valjean, in particular, was a very dangerous man who likely stole very quickly after leaving prison. Forgive me, likely stole from a bishop shortly after leaving prison. I almost forgot that he did steal a forty-sous piece from a poor child on that same day he broke parole."

"Why would he need to take a coin from a poor child when he had all that silver?" Cosette asked uncomprehendingly.

"He didn't," Javert said simply. "And that completely invalidates any argument anyone might make about him only stealing out of necessity. And no man who was trying not to be a criminal anymore would have broken parole in the first place so it was no surprise to see him arrested years later. You see now why it was so important that we caught him? I regret that I was not the one to catch him-" he regretted the fact that he had been so sure that it was her father "-but I was able to identify him and return him to prison where he belongs."

"That's a sad story," Cosette said unhappily.

Javert rather thought it was a triumph for the justice system although it had failed with Valjean for several years so perhaps he could see her point.

"Don't break the law."


	14. Chapter 14

Javert had sent men out to call off the search and to bring Madeleine back but until the mayor arrived he had to keep an eye Cosette so that she did not wander off again and set off another manhunt. He was tempted to have someone else watch her but they all had their own duties that he could not expect them to have to set aside so he would not have to wait a few more minutes with her.

He kept an eye on Cosette while he went back to his paperwork.

It was quiet for a few minutes before Cosette spoke up. "How did you know my mother?"

"What?" Javert asked distractedly.

"How did you know my mother?" Cosette repeated patiently.

"Why don't you ask your father that?" Javert suggested, not looking forward to starting yet another discussion.

"I did," Cosette told him. "He said that my mother used to work in his factory and then she got sick and so he visited her."

That was technically true though it left out a lot of rather important details such as the fact that Fantine had been fired and become a prostitute who Madeline discovered blamed him for the way her life had turned out and so Madeleine took it upon himself to rescue her from justice and set her up in the hospital like some sort of a countess.

"I met your mother when I was trying to arrest her," Javert explained.

Cosette's brow furrowed and she looked quite confused. "I don't understand."

"What is not to understand?" Javert asked rhetorically. "You know what being under arrest is, surely."

Cosette nodded. "I do. But you said that you arrest bad guys and my mother was not a bad guy."

"I…" Javert trailed off, uncertain of what to say. He had no intention of lying to her, of course, but he wasn't sure how to phrase the truth. 'Bad guy' was such a simplistic term and perhaps that was what he should start with. "I arrest people who break the law. I believe that if someone is willing to break the law then that means that there is something wrong with them and that they will always be the kind of person who are willing to break the law. Even if they only broke the law once and never broke it again for the rest of their life, there is something in them that would cause them to break the law if they had been in a situation where honest men would choose not to. That is why law-breakers are so dangerous to society and must be appropriately dealt with. Does that make sense?"

It clearly did not but Cosette nodded anyway. "Yes."

Well, it wasn't like he knew how to simplify that any further and so he let it go. "Your mother broke the law and might have broken the law in the past or would break it in the future had she lived. She was the kind of person who was willing to break the law and so she needed to be punished."

Cosette was looking frightfully unhappy. "But what did she do?"

"There was a man who was saying mean things to her and who threw snow down her dress," Javert informed her. "Now this is not nice behavior and people really should refrain from doing it but it was not illegal. What was illegal was how she responded. She scratched him hard enough to draw blood."

"That's not fair!" Cosette complained. "She only did it because he was being so mean and scratching someone's not really that bad. I got scratched all the time before and it was better than being kicked or punched or sent outside with no shoes!"

Once again, Javert directed a dark thought towards the Thénardiers for the injustice that they had visited upon this child whose mother had paid for better care to be taken of. "She was only to receive six months which, you should remember from Valjean's tale, was really not all that much. And she would have gotten in off the streets so it may have even benefited her."

"Why would she be on the streets?" Cosette asked, puzzled.

Did Fantine have accommodation before her near-arrest? He did not even know. "She was very badly off after being fired."

Cosette's eyes widened. "And she still had to send money so the Thénardiers wouldn't send me out into the cold. Is it my fault she got sick?"

That was a stupid question. Without Cosette Fantine would never have been fired and fallen into prostitution but that was the result of Fantine's own poor choices in having a child without being properly married first (or at least becoming the mistress of a man who would take care of her and the child if she couldn't even manage matrimony).

"No and regardless of what your father might think, it wasn't his fault, either," Javert said curtly.

Cosette tilted her head. "Why would it be his fault?"

"It wouldn't, weren't you listening?" Javert asked a bit impatiently. "He just felt guilty because his forewoman fired your mother because your father wants his employees to have good morals and the forewoman did not think your mother had good morals. He had no idea that your mother even existed and the minute he found out he wouldn't let me arrest her and took her to the hospital so he did far more than he was obligated to even if it had been his fault. Which it wasn't."

Cosette nodded slowly. "Does Papa blame himself for things that are not his fault a lot?"

"I would imagine so," Javert told her. He was not entirely sure but if the Fantine situation was any indication then it seemed likely.

"I still don't think she should have gotten in trouble when the man who threw snow down her dress didn't," Cosette announced.

"There are certain things that you cannot say unless you want to get in trouble with the law, usually words talking about bringing down the government," Javert told her slowly. "But aside from that words do not do physical damage and so it is up to law-abiding citizens to ignore any words that they don't like. And throwing snow down her dress may have made her colder but it really is harmless. But we cannot have people attacking each other in the streets. That is the fastest way to the death of law and order and the birth of chaos."

Cosette was quiet for a long moment. "I'm glad Papa stopped you from arresting her."

Javert snorted. "That does not surprise me."

Madeleine burst through the door then, looking as close to panicked as Javert had ever seen him.

"Cosette!" he cried out, rushing to her side.

Cosette smiled sweetly at him and gave him a big hug. "I'm sorry I worried you, Papa."

Madeleine bent down and smoothed her hair back. "Oh, Cosette, you cannot just run off like that without telling anybody where you are!"

She looked down. "I know, I'm sorry. I didn't think. School got out early and nobody was there to get me and I didn't want to bother anybody and I always went out by myself before."

"Well now you have people that worry about you and want to make sure that you're safe," Madeleine told her.

Cosette nodded. "I promise I won't do something like this again."

Madeleine managed to tear his eyes away from his daughter long enough to turn to Javert. "Javert, I wanted to thank you for what you did. If you had not found her then I do not know what might have happened or, if nothing did, how long I would have had to worry."

"It was my duty."

Madeleine smiled at that. "So you have said. Come, Cosette, let's leave the good Inspector to his work."

Mercifully, they left then and Javert was able to get back to his paperwork.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

During dinner that night, Valjean asked Cosette if she had enjoyed spending time with Javert while waiting for him to come and get her.

Cosette frowned. "I don't know."

"What do you mean?" Valjean asked. It seemed to him that it should be a pretty easy question to answer assuming that one was not trying to hide the fact that he was formerly a convict. Since the trial, he had noticed that he had liked Javert far more than he had before. Oh, he had never avoided the man before or given any sign that he wished to avoid him (or so he hoped) but the uneasiness had been present and now it was gone.

"I learned a lot," Cosette told him. "He doesn't not tell you things because you're a child. But I don't like some of the things he says."

"Like what?" Valjean asked, suddenly on guard. What exactly had Javert been telling Cosette? She did not look upset but that did not necessarily mean anything.

"He told me that you saved my mother when he wanted to arrest her for scratching a man that who was being really mean to her," Cosette told him. "Thank you for saving my mother."

Valjean had two rather disparate reactions to this simple statement. The first was anger-tinged fear that Javert would have told Cosette something like that when she really had no need to know of this, perhaps ever, and certainly not at her age. The second was guilt because, though he had done his best from that moment on, it was simply too late to save her and he had already been the one to condemn her in the first place.

"I…you're welcome," Valjean said awkwardly in lieu of having to explain to Cosette just what he had done to her mother. "What exactly did Javert say? Did he tell you why that man was harassing your mother?"

Cosette thought about it and shook her head. "He did say that she was poor and spent a lot of time outside on the street where she got sick."

Valjean felt his heart calm. It would appear that Javert had the sense not to tell Cosette that her mother had been a prostitute after all.

"He says that everyone he arrests are bad guys," Cosette continued. "Or at least will always break the law. I don't know, it got confusing at that part."

"Javert is a good man," Valjean replied. "But he does not believe in mercy or second chances."

"But God believes in second chances," Cosette protested. "He sent his only son to die for our sins to give everyone a second chance."

"That is true," Valjean agreed. "In his line of work…the law is often very harsh so it does not matter that he is not a man of mercy since he is a man of justice. If you break the law then he will punish you to the full extent of the law but not a centimeter over the line. Not everyone is so…correct."

"I guess that's good," Cosette said thoughtfully. "It's not his fault that the law's so mean."

"It is not, indeed. But why do you say that the law is mean?" Valjean asked.

"I asked him to tell me about a criminal and he did and the story was sad. He did not think it was sad but it was," Cosette answered.

Javert actually told her about a criminal? Of course he did. Valjean would hardly call himself an expert on children, having only had Cosette for a few months and his previous extensive experience with children was nearly thirty years ago, but that seemed like one of those obvious things you did not talk to children about. And especially not girl children!

"What did he say?" Valjean asked cautiously.

"He told me about a man named Jean Valjean."

He had not expected to hear that name from her then or ever. He was fully prepared to never hear that name again unless he did decide to go and see Champmathieu. It was to his credit, he thought, that he only nearly choked. If Javert was there he could have passed off his reaction (possibly without actually having to say anything as Javert would make his assumptions) as being about the fact that Javert had told her about the man Madeleine had been mistaken for. Cosette had no idea about that fiasco (well, she hadn't before today. Who knew what else Javert had told her?) and so she just looked at him in concern.

"I'm fine, Cosette," he assured her. "I just should have chewed more before trying to swallow."

Cosette nodded like that made perfect sense to her.

"Why don't you tell me what he said?" Valjean invited hesitantly.

He was far from certain that he wanted to know what Javert had to say about him (though it was possibly his only opportunity to find out as he really had no reason asking about the matter after so long and would probably convince Javert that he was holding a grudge about the accusation or something. He did not always understand what would upset Javert and did not want to risk it) and he was even less certain he wanted to hear Cosette's own thoughts. Javert probably believed that he was completely irredeemable and deserved to rot in prison for breaking his ban as mercy was not part of his character and he had looked at Valjean doing his good works for this town and was still willing to denounce him.

Cosette, though…No matter how Cosette felt about Jean Valjean the convict she would never look at the actual Valjean with any emotion she had reserved for the convict since she would never know the truth about him. Champmathieu's damnation meant that he no longer had the right to risk his identity or burden someone with the knowledge. He could not save that man and so he could not make his agony worth nothing. Valjean had gone through life accepting that virtually everyone (some people, such as Sister Simplice, he found sufficiently Bishop-like to perhaps see past his old sins) would hate him if they knew the truth ever since he had begun concealing the truth behind the mask of Madeleine to escape the hatred of virtually everyone he met. It was one thing to know that one would be hated and another to hear it stated so plain. And what was the hate of a stranger compared to the hatred or fear of Cosette? He did not know how he would be able to live with himself if she reacted the way that everyone always reacted. It would not be her fault, of course, and she would be perfectly right to draw back from his sins but it would kill him nonetheless.

"He told me that he stole a loaf of bread but did it stupidly and got caught and then tried to run stupidly four times and so spent nineteen years in the worst place ever," Cosette explained.

Valjean had not expected to feel vaguely offended by her reply (not at her but at what she was repeating from Javert) but he did. "Stupid? Did he say how it was stupid?"

Cosette nodded. "He punched the glass with his fist so he was bleeding and threw the loaf away and only took one. And after the first escape he kept trying even though it never worked."

Well, he had always known that his attempts to escape (after the first one. Who could fault him for the first try for freedom even if it was so close to the end of his sentence?) had been more instinctual than rational but to call him stupid for the crime that had destroyed his life and the lives of his family? That hardly seemed fair. And it would not have mattered if he had used a rock or took ten loaves and kept all of them because he had still been caught and none of the aspects that Javert had taken issue with had led to his capture.

He looked encouragingly at Cosette.

"He said that men who break the law once will always have it in them to break the law and so are really dangerous and that the convicts at Toulon all make each other worse so they're even more bad when they come out," she continued.

It had honestly surprised him that Javert had described Toulon as being so terrible to Cosette. He rather doubted that he had actually said that it was the worst place ever but perhaps he was trying to instill fear of the place in her, despite the fact that as a woman she would never set foot in there. And since the prisoners were there to be punished, Javert might even see the terrible conditions as an asset. He probably did, come to think of it.

It wasn't that Valjean could not understand and even agree with, a little, the argument that if someone has broken the law once they are more likely than someone who has never broken the law to break the law in the future. Some people are willing to break the law if circumstances turn bleak enough (and others did not need a good excuse) and others were not. A man who had let desperation turn him to crime once might do it again. A man who had not turned to crime might do so in the future or he might be the type to rather starve and keep his soul than give in to temptation. It did not justify the parole system that had made it impossible for him to become a good person and stay Jean Valjean and he knew that those who made that argument often used it to do just that.

"I hardly think it's just the convicts though that might be part of it," Valjean said finally. "As Javert said, Toulon is a terrible place and you cannot stay the same in such an environment. When you're in a bad situation, you do what you can to survive."

Cosette bit her lip and then nodded.

And now he was reminding her of her own past, wasn't he?

"Maybe we should talk about something else," he suggested.

But Cosette shook her head. "I didn't think it was fair that that poor man did one thing wrong and it led to his whole life being bad after that. And then he had to run away once he got out and now he's back in Toulon forever. It's just so sad."

Valjean's heart was suddenly so full that he could not speak.

"Papa?" Cosette asked curiously, tilting her head. "Are you alright?"

Valjean swallowed convulsively and then smiled at her so widely it almost hurt. "Oh yes, my dear child. I am perfectly wonderful."


	15. Chapter 15

Javert had just gotten in from his patrol when Madeleine walked into the Prefecture.

"Monsieur le Maire," Javert said respectfully, bowing his head.

"Good afternoon, Inspector," Madeleine greeted him with a friendly smile.

Javert was not sure what to make of that. Madeleine had always been at least a little civil, even during that point after Fantine's arrest when he had come to admit that he had falsely denounced Madeleine as a convict. Oh, he had been a little cold perhaps at the beginning but Javert had been avoiding him and the moment that Madeleine had heard of how Javert had disgraced himself he had seemed to forget all about that and go on about promotions and esteem or whatnot.

If Javert had not been firmly convinced that there was no possibility whatsoever that Madeleine could be Jean Valjean he would have taken this for an attempt at bribery and would have been insulted. As it was, he had assumed that the mayor had taken pity on him and was considering making him his newest charity case and had still been insulted. He had been far less insulted, however, and – largely – refrained from showing that because his treachery and disloyalty had earned him far worse than a little condescension. He had, in fact, been a little relieved that the mayor's (probably accidental) punishing him with pity had ameliorated the uneasiness he had had about not being dismissed in disgrace for his betrayal.

He could not recall Madeleine being actually friendly before and it certainly did not seem appropriate to be discussing a work-related matter. And what else did they ever talk about besides the matter of Jean Valjean which was, in fact, tangentially related to their jobs.

"Is there something you need of me?" he asked nevertheless.

"No, nothing like that," Madeleine assured him. "I just wanted to thank you for helping me find Cosette."

"You already thanked me," Javert pointed out.

"Did I?" Madeleine asked rhetorically. "I confess that I was just so relieved to see her that I don't even remember. But, in any event, thank you again for your actions. I cannot overstate just how worried I was for her and, though she was fine when you found her, had you not located her who knows what might have happened before she made it safely home?"

"Montreuil is the safest town I have ever been stationed at," Javert replied. "But I do take your point."

"It is good to know that you can rely on the police here," Madeleine continued.

"Were you not able to before?" Javert inquired, wondering as he always did when such sentiment was expressed whether a lack of confidence in the police said something about the character of the person expressing these sentiments or about the police they had encountered themselves who were not always as correct as they should be.

"I…have not always had the best experiences with them," Madeleine said slowly. "But please allow me to say that you are the finest officer I have ever known and a credit to your uniform."

Javert grimaced. "You seem to be forgetting about a certain unfortunate letter that I once wrote."

"No, it is not forgotten," Madeleine corrected him. "I can just appreciate that your dedication to the law is paramount and not even money or an official title would protect a wanted criminal from you."

"You put it so much grander than it was," Javert said, almost accusingly. "I was mistaken. I was stupid. You could never have been such a man."

"Perhaps not," Madeleine agreed. "But you were not willing to let those things that I mentioned stop you from investigating and seeing the possibility that we two could have been one and the same. I am sure that at some point a criminal will manage to look quite respectable indeed and I do not think that other members of the police will be quite so willing to bring the truth to light as you are."

"I could have done you great harm," Javert protested.

"I do not believe so," Madeleine said. "It seems easy enough to be able to tell a man who has been to the galleys from one who has not. There are scars that living, what was it, twenty years under the lash will leave upon you, scars that are unlikely to be attained in any other way. Scars on the wrists and ankles for chains, perhaps? You did mention a certain limp. And I have seen enough men just released from prison to know that there is usually a strange scarring on the skull. There are also brands, I believe, which make the matter rather clear."

"Nineteen years," Javert corrected. "And Jean Valjean entered Toulon before the brands were reinstated. But you are correct in that the courts could not fail to correctly distinguish between a man who is a convict and a man who is not. The farthest it ever could have gotten was you being examined by doctors, the district attorney, and perhaps a few witnesses."

"Yes, even when I attempted to tell the world that I was Jean Valjean they still saw right through me," Madeleine said, something a little odd in his voice.

"I was still wrong to have done so," Javert insisted.

"Because you were mistaken, perhaps. If you had been right you would have been a hero and either way you would have just been doing your duty. There is something admirable in being willing to pursue your duty regardless of what your superiors would have you do, as frustrating as that may be as your superior at times," Madeleine said firmly. "You may not believe me, Javert, but my opinion will not change. That is the wonderful thing about opinions; it does not matter how strong of an argument you can mount because we are under no obligation to change them."

"As you wish," Javert said.

"I would like to invite you to dinner tomorrow night," Madeleine said abruptly.

Javert started. "Monsieur le Maire?"

"You saved Cosette and so I feel that this is the best and most appropriate way to thank you," Madeleine continued.

That was overstating it a little. She had been having fun playing with her friends and, even if something bad might have happened to her without Javert finding her, she had not been in need of immediate saving. It was not like Madeleine and Fauchelevent's cart.

"It really is not necessary," Javert demurred.

"Oh, I think it is," Madeleine disagreed. "Cosette and I have guests so infrequently, you understand that I prefer a solitary lifestyle and you know better than I what horrors Cosette faced before coming here, and I can think of no one better to be a rare guest at our home than the man who so faithfully serves this town and saved Cosette's life."

It was not as though Javert had not received what he considered effusive bursts of gratitude before though it was not very common with the public's view of the police being what it was. He had learned that there really was no arguing with people if they persisted on believing that simply doing one's duty was cause for such thankfulness or that locating a perfectly safe child was akin to saving a life.

Javert knew that such an event would be incredibly uncomfortable and he was not entirely sure it was appropriate given that he was the man's subordinate but such things could be rendered acceptable at the superior's wish. He did not have the time to argue about it, that was certain, and so he carefully scrutinized Madeleine, looking for traces of uncertainty. He found none, just the usual stubborn determination. Madeleine really meant for him to come and he was willing to spend as long as it took trying to convince him.

"Very well, Monsieur le Maire," Javert acquiesced.

Madeleine couldn't hide his look of surprise. "Ah, that is wonderful, Javert! Would seven o'clock work with your schedule?"

Javert nodded. "It would indeed. It is very thoughtful of you to take my schedule into consideration."

"It would be foolish of me not to considering that I am your superior and your duties are for the preservation and protection of my town," Madeleine replied. "I look forward to seeing you then, Inspector."

Javert just sighed and put it out of his mind for now before starting in on his paperwork.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Valjean and Cosette were enjoying a nice walk through town together. The weather was nice and the people waved to them or called out to them but did not stop and talk and interrupt their peace. Valjean still felt a little awkward at all of this adoration and never truly felt like he knew what to say (strangely, he seemed to be on better ground with Javert for all that their discussions were always also awkward or semi-arguments about deeply held worldviews) but everyone else seemed to think that he did alright or at the least were used to his social fumbling.

And it was rather nice to be greeted with universal regard when compared to the universal disdain he was still so used to receiving. He would have thought that the eight years he had as a respectable man (first a hero, than a hero factory owner philanthropist, then finally a hero factory owning philanthropic mayor) would have gotten him used to such things, especially as he had only actually been on parole and thus rejected by everyone for five days.

Eight years was nothing to the nineteen years in Toulon but he had not had much contact with ordinary men then and the people of Toulon had viewed the guards far more harshly than the convicts. Why that was Valjean was never quite sure of because while he himself had hated the guards with more ferocity than he had hated everyone and everything else, he highly doubted that the guards would go around beating the townspeople.

And before Toulon, though it was difficult to remember, he had mostly been ignored by everyone the same way he had been after breaking parole and before he came to Montreuil. Being ignored was really all he had ever aspired to once he had first tasted infamy and this…it was overwhelming at times. He still didn't feel that he deserved it but he almost guiltily appreciated their well-wishes and esteem.

And Cosette! This was all very good for her, he thought, so he would have welcomed it no matter how much he might have hated it. Cosette had (from the bits and pieces he had heard about her past though they had not really directly discussed it and he was, perhaps naively, hoping she would just forget all about it as time passed) been well-known back in Montfermeil but the townspeople had not been kind. They had not disdained her as she had been an innocent but they had been silent witnesses to her mistreatment and had not seen fit to do anything about it. They called her the Lark and treated her as an object of curiosity, gossiping about how her mother had abandoned her and how good the Thénardiers were to have taken her inn for free right where she could hear. And she had never known just how wrong the gossip had been.

Well, she knew now, at least.

And she really did seem to enjoy the way that people were so much more friendly now. Valjean smiled at them more so he would not have to speak to them than because he was glad of the attention but Cosette seemed to thrive under this sort of general feeling of goodwill that was directed their way.

One familiar figure did step into their path.

"Hello, Monsieur le Maire," Bamatabois said, doffing his hat. "Mademoiselle Cosette."

Cosette giggled the way that she always did at being addressed as Mademoiselle even though it was a pretty regular occurrence nowadays. Valjean could not decide if he found it more sweet or sad that after all this time such a basic form of polite address could elicit such a reaction from her. He remembered how he had responded to first being called Monsieur after nineteen years (before he proved himself utterly unworthy of such consideration by making off with the silver but he tried not to think of that) and seeing the parallels between his wretched and hopeless self after nineteen years in Toulon and this innocent child was difficult.

"Hello, Monsieur," she chirped.

"Cosette, this is Monsieur Bamatabois," Valjean introduced.

He knew that he owed Bamatabois a great deal, whether he liked it or not. He was not pleased at the blatant way that Bamatabois had subverted the course of justice and allowed Valjean to keep his position at the expense of an innocent man but a darker part of him was grateful that the other man had done what he could not bring himself to do. The fact that this man knew his secret, for all he would never tell as long as Valjean continued to bring prosperity to Montreuil, also sat uneasily with him. He wasn't sure why, exactly. There was just something about Bamatabois. Perhaps it was his willingness to convince an entire jury that a man who had confessed and was willing if not eager to accept his punishment was confused and the fact that he had succeeded at it. Someone who was that good at substituting his version of reality in place of the truth…It may be hypocritical or he may just be reacting negatively to aspects he recognized in himself. It made him uneasy.

Cosette curtseyed for him. "Monsieur Bamatabois."

"What a well-behaved child!" Bamatabois exclaimed, smiling at her.

They spoke for a few minutes before Bamatabois excused himself and Valjean tried to pretend that he was not pleased to see him go.

"He seems nice," Cosette remarked.

"So he does."

They walked for a little longer before some ragged children run up to him and look up hopefully.

Valjean's heart tugs at him the way it always does. Children should not live like this but even now he has failed to completely eradicate this sort of wretchedness from Montreuil.

One day. That's what keeps him going, the dream that one day he will see an end to this sort of misery.

Cosette eyes them curiously and it occurred to him that perhaps she had not been with him when these poor children approached him before. On the one hand, he did not want to break her heart by exposing her to yet more pain but on the other it was important to instill the values of charity and compassion for others in her.

Valjean smiled at them as he gave them a few coins and they thanked him before running off.

Cosette was frowning after them.

"What is it?" Valjean asked her.

"Who were those people?" she asked.

Valjean sighed heavily. "They live on the streets. Their parents are either dead or have abandoned them."

Cosette clutched at his hand. "They looked like me."

Valjean knelt down next to her and brushed her hair behind her ear. "You were never abandoned, Cosette. Your mother always loved you." He could not say the same of the man who had not married her mother but he really did not know enough about the man to say that he was even still alive and there was really no need to upset Cosette with the story.

Cosette looked down. "I know. But I didn't know for a long time and I did not live on the streets but the Thénardiers' inn and I do not think that was much better."

Valjean could think of no other response to that other than to pick her up. "Well it's over now and you never have to worry about that again."

"But what about them?" Cosette asked, nodding in the direction that the children had gone. "Will they be alright?"

Valjean sighed. "I don't know, Cosette. I do what I can, giving money to them whenever they approach me. If they should live long enough, I will employ them in my factory."

Cosette tightened her grip on him. "You mean they might die?"

Valjean winced. That was careless of him to say. "I hope not. Like I said, they know that they can come to me anytime they need money and that should keep them alive."

"I don't like to see people out in the cold with nowhere to go," Cosette said softly. "I especially don't like it when it's children."

"Me neither," Valjean told her as he began to walk on. The weather was still nice but the cold was coming, he knew that well. "And that is why I try to help them out as best I can. It is not enough to just give people money to help them live to see tomorrow, though that is very important as well."

"It's not?" Cosette asked.

"No, you also have to try and make sure there are other things available to help them. Giving money to the church, or example, or funding a school. Providing work for parents so that more children do not end up on the street," Valjean explained.

Sometimes he worried about the future of Montreuil. He did good work, he knew, and had no intention of stopping anytime soon but he was just one man and he was getting older. What would happen to the town once he died? What would become of his factory? It was better for him to single-handedly supply the money to improve life than for nobody to do so but it all seemed to center around him. And that was fine as long as he was there to give them money. One day he wouldn't be. What would happen then? He didn't like to think about it.

"That sounds like it will take a long time," Cosette said unhappily.

"It will," Valjean agreed. "But one day, Cosette. One day."


	16. Chapter 16

Javert had been dreading this moment all day. He had promised Madeleine that he would come to dinner and he could appreciate the sentiment behind the request but it was just all too informal for a member of the police to dine with the mayor at his home. At least Madeleine did not live in a house suiting one of his ranking or Javert really did not know how he could stomach it. But he had made a commitment to his superior and so he had to go

He would not have thought that such a thing were possible, particularly after the Jean Valjean incident, but it would appear that Madeleine was determined to just pretend that that whole thing had never happened.

He knocked and almost immediately the door sprang open and Cosette was beaming up at him. "Hello, Inspector!"

Was she waiting by the door for him to arrive? How very odd. Didn't they have a portress for that sort of thing?

Sure enough, an older woman followed after her.

"Monsieur Inspector," she greeted him with a smile. "Please, allow me to take your coat."

Reluctantly, Javert surrendered it. It was only proper, after all, but it did put something of a damper on his ability to leave. Not that he anticipated the mayor would keep him against his will but he still felt strangely naked without it.

"Papa said that I was to get him at once when you got here so let's go," Cosette said, grabbing his hand and starting to tug him along.

It took him a moment to realize what was happening before he pulled away from her though he did continue to follow her.

"You always do that," Cosette complained, pouting. "Why?"

"Because I do not like it when people grab my hand," Javert replied, wondering why she would need such a simple concept explained to her.

Cosette nodded. "But why?"

"Because I do not."

"That's not a reason," Cosette said.

"Why do you like grabbing onto other people's hands then?" Javert challenged.

"That's easy," Cosette told him. "It makes me happy to touch other people. And I feel safe when I'm holding Papa's hand. You're a police inspector so I can feel safe with you, too. Papa promised."

It was hardly his job to make young girls feel safe, even when those young girls were the daughters of his superior, but there was no harm in her feeling safe that his duties were being performed to the best of his abilities. He did rather like to think that the streets of Montreuil, already hardly rife with crime, were a little safer for his actions.

"So you can like grabbing my hand because it makes you happy but I need a better reason to not like it than it makes me unhappy?" Javert asked.

"Yes."

"Oh, Cosette," Madeleine said, chuckling, as they entered what must be the dining area. "Do not pester our guest."

"I won't, Papa," Cosette said, going over to hug him.

Madeleine knelt down so he could hug her back properly and then straightened to face Javert. "Javert, I am pleased that you could make it this evening."

"I said that I would."

"You did, yes," Madeleine agreed a little awkwardly. "Would you please sit down?"

Javert nodded and the three of them sat down.

"Papa, where are the silver candlesticks?" Cosette asked. "I like them."

Madeleine started coughing and Javert politely diverted his attention to the portress who was bringing in some soup.

"Are you okay?" Cosette asked, concerned.

"I am, yes, thank you," Madeleine assured her. "I just…I like them, too, but I'm afraid that…we quite ran out of polish and I did not notice until too late. Please forgive my vanity, Javert, but I would rather not display tarnished silver."

"It is no matter to me," Javert replied.

"I am afraid that I did not know what you liked to eat so I hope this will be satisfactory," Madeleine told him.

Javert took a spoonful of soup. "This is very good."

Madeleine smiled at him. "I am glad to hear it."

"This is my favorite soup," Cosette declared.

Madeleine chuckled fondly. "That's what you said about the last three soups you've had."

Cosette frowned for a moment before her brow cleared. "Well, they are all my favorite soup."

"I think you might be missing the meaning of the word 'favorite'," Javert told her.

Cosette shook her head. "No, I know what it means. Favorite means that you love it the best. Like Papa is my favorite."

Madeleine colored but looked pleased.

"Yes that is what it means," Javert conceded.

"So I do know what it means," Cosette said.

"But you cannot have everything be your favorite," Javert protested.

"I don't have everything be my favorite," Cosette insisted. "Only those things."

"Do you have any soup that isn't your favorite?"

"The soup I had before I met Papa," Cosette answered promptly.

"How can you have one soup that you like best of all, your favorite, if so many of them are your favorite?" Javert demanded.

"I like them all equally, that's how," Cosette said.

"Perhaps we should discuss something else," Madeleine broke in.

Javert realized suddenly that he had been arguing with a child (and in front of her father the mayor no less!) and stiffened. Madeleine's expression was tolerantly amused but Javert imaged that he could detect a hint of reproach there. And if there wasn't because Madeleine refused to behave like a rational superior then there should have been.

But she really did have such a dreadful understanding of these things!

"Of course," he said belatedly.

The three of them sat in silence for a few minutes.

"Did you arrest any criminals today?" Cosette asked abruptly.

Madeleine practically choked on his food. "Cosette!"

"What?" Cosette asked innocently. "At dinner we always talk about our day and Inspector Javert arrests criminals at work so I wanted to know if he caught someone."

"I'm sure that Inspector Javert would rather not go through his day for your amusement," Madeleine told her.

Cosette looked disappointed and Javert literally had no better topic to introduce (and it would seem that Madeleine did not either) so he said, "I do not mind."

Cosette brightened at once. "Oh, thank you!"

Madeleine hesitated, taking a long considering look at Javert. "Alright. But please try not to scare her."

"I could never be scared of someone stopping bad guys," Cosette insisted. "Even if the law is mean sometimes."

Javert's eyebrows shot up to his hairline. "The law is mean sometimes?" he repeated, his eyes on Madeleine. It was almost an accusation.

Madeleine held up his hands and laughed. "That was your doing, Javert, not mine."

"Really."

"It was, actually, I'm afraid. You and your story of…what was that man's name?" Madeleine asked, furrowing his brow.

Javert was a little surprised that Madeleine could not remember Valjean's name since Javert had mistaken him for that man but he supposed that who, exactly, Javert had mistaken Madeleine for was not important, only that he was a convict. And Madeleine, not actually being a convict and thus having nothing to fear, had never really taken the news as badly as Javert really felt he should have, even if by the time Javert disclosed the information he had been convinced that he was wrong.

"It was Jean Valjean," Cosette said helpfully.

Madeleine nodded. "Ah, right."

"How is that evidence that the law is mean?" Javert asked, flabbergasted. Then, before anyone could say anything, he held up a hand. "Wait, never mind, don't tell me. You and I will never come to an agreement on this and I do not imagine I shall have much more luck with your child."

Madeleine smiled at the mention of Cosette being his child because he was entirely too sentimental.

"Did you?" Cosette asked eagerly.

"Did I what?" Javert asked, frowning. "Ah, did I arrest anyone today? No, I did not."

Cosette sighed sadly.

"It is a good thing, Cosette," Madeleine said gently. "It means that the people are safer since there was not a big crime to investigate. Places where people are arrested all of the time tend to be more dangerous. And this means that no poor soul was driven to such desperation as to break the law and spend too many years in our too harsh prisons."

Javert narrowed his eyes. Perhaps Madeleine had not directly told Cosette that the law was mean (the childish phrasing not sound like something that someone as old as Madeleine would say anyway) or induced sympathy for Valjean in her but if he was going around teaching her things like that then was it any wonder the girl was confused? The streets were safer when there was less crime but less arrests did not always mean less crime (the criminal classes were incorrigible and arresting one just led to another one popping up to take his place). And too harsh prisons? Too many years spent there? Those poor criminals!

It was times like these that Javert remembered why he had been so certain that Madeleine was a convict himself because how else could he honestly believe these things? But he wasn't and it must just be that he was a saint who had never seen enough of the world to know the reality of his ideals.

"I know," Cosette admitted. "But everyone being happy and safe does not make for a very interesting story."

Madeleine did not seem to know what to say to that.

"I can tell you about an arrest I made two weeks ago," Javert offered.

"Oh, would you?" Cosette asked, her eyes wide.

"I would not have offered if I was not willing to," Javert could not help replying. "It began with the disappearance of a statue."

"A statue disappeared?" Cosette asked, fascinated. "But they're so big! How would one take it away? And without anybody noticing?"

"That was the first thing we wondered but we knew we wouldn't know for sure until we caught the man," Javert told her. "Of course, it turned out not to be just one man. How could it be? But we really hadn't expected…"

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There had been too many awkward moments for Javert's taste though admittedly not everything had been awkward which had been what he had expecting. Apparently Madeleine had been expected one long awkward moment after another as well for when that failed to happen he had declared the evening a success.

That would not have been so bad if he had not invited Javert over for dinner again every week since then. Over the past three months, Javert had been able to avoid such a thing all but twice.

Javert would have suspected that Madeleine was just being polite by persisting in inviting Javert despite the extremely low success rate (though he did have to ask how polite it could possibly be to keep pestering a man who clearly was not interested) if Madeleine hadn't managed to get his way a few times. It might be his imagination but he rather thought that those dinners were getting less awkward. He still did not understand why the invitations kept coming, however, as any debt Madeleine thought he had incurred when Javert had located Cosette must be paid back by now.

And it was absurd for Madeleine to speak of debts anyway when he only ever acknowledged debts that he believed that he had owed (debts which anyone else would not have recognized) and would not hear anything about debts owed to him.

Yes, his supposed debt to Fantine had ended with his taking possession of Cosette and that pleased Madeleine beyond reason but that made his one-sided debts no more rational. For Javert to not be able to try and pay the debt he owed over the Valjean matter – if he even could – but to be saddled with a 'debt' Madeleine owed because Javert had simply done his job was intolerable. Yet whenever he broached the subject of Madeleine's unequal approach to debts the man just smiled and changed the subject.

"Inspector Javert!" Cosette's voice rang out suddenly. He had encountered her more often since she had not come home after school and Madeleine had started his campaign to play host to Javert and yet she still persisted in calling him by his full title. He was pleased by this but it was a mouthful to say every time. Most would have shortened it to 'Inspector' by now.

"What are you doing here?" Javert asked, standing up. "Coming here instead of staying where you are supposed to do is not going to make your father worry any less."

Though it would save time when Madeleine arrived to request that they look for the girl. And, knowing him, there was a good chance that Madeleine would feel grateful to Javert for 'finding' her this time as well.

"Don't worry," Cosette told him. "Madame Martin let me come in and say hello." She gestured to the portress of her building which Javert only just now noticed had followed Cosette in.

"Hello, then."

Cosette laughed at this for some reason. "I also wanted to ask you a question," she said, lowering her voice.

Javert sat down again. "What is it?"

"Are you and Papa friends?" she asked innocently.

Whatever Javert had been expecting (and if he were honest then he really had no idea what he was really expecting, possibly something else worrying about how Cosette didn't like the law), that was not it. "What?"

"Papa is the mayor of the town," Cosette said reasonably, apparently understanding that he had not misheard her but needed an explanation for the question. "It's his job to talk to lots of people. And whenever we go out more people want to talk to him. He's very nice to them and gives them money if they need it. But you're the only one that ever comes to dinner."

"I've been to dinner three times," Javert protested.

"That's three times more than anyone else ever is," Cosette said. "I do not know what happened before I came. Maybe he doesn't invite people because now he has a daughter. But he does invite you all the time. You usually say no."

There might have been something to that, actually. Madeleine was very protective of Cosette and, as Cosette's "savior", Javert was someone he would trust around her. And yet…

Javert sighed. "I did not watch your father every second of the day before you arrived." Though he had kept a rather close eye on him in case this clear saint turned out to be a convict in disguise or something. "Still, I do not believe that he invited many people over." A memory came to him then. "In fact, there was once a time a few years back when the entire town realized that nobody had ever seen what your father's rooms looked like so this very brazen woman asked him if he would show them to her."

Cosette blinked in confusion. "Our rooms are not anything special."

"They had no way of knowing that until they saw them. And your father did let everybody who wanted to see them." Javert chuckled. "I believe they were rather disappointed with just how ordinary everything was. They were imaging all sorts of exciting things, you see. One rumor that caught my attention was that he was killing people and keeping their bodies in his room and that is why he never let anyone in there."

Cosette looked highly skeptical. "Killing people? My papa?"

"I don't think anybody really believed it," Javert conceded. Even he had not (for one thing, where were the reports of missing people? If he was targeting the people of the street why would they still be so friendly to him? And how would he disguise the smell) and he had suspected him to be a vile convict capable of anything. "But people will talk."

"They really should find something better to do," Cosette said, a strange look in her eyes. She swallowed hard. "But you did not answer my question. Are you and Papa friends?"

Javert was not sure what to say. "Did your father say that we are friends?"

Cosette gave a long-suffering sigh. "I tried to ask him but he was not able to answer me either. I just do not understand why this is so hard. You either are friends or you are not."

What had it meant that Madeleine had not said no? What had it meant that he had not said yes?

It was absurd for men of their positions to be friends but since when had Madeleine ever cared for such things? Javert's respect for the man had never been in doubt since the day he had been proven wrong about him being Valjean but he was not always sure that he liked him. And yet, who in his life would be closer to being a friend? It was not as though he had a great deal of experience in the matter. And what did it really matter what the answer was? He did not imagine that it would change anything.

"That is true," Javert agreed. "But, friends or not, perhaps it is not always so easy to tell if we are."

"I do not know if you spend a lot of time with other people outside of work or giving alms, Inspector Javert," Cosette told him seriously. "But my papa does not and yet he keeps trying to spend time with you. And sometimes you even say yes."

"He is my superior."

"If that was why you would always say yes," Cosette said shrewdly. "Well, here it is then! If you two won't decide then I will decide for you. You are friends."

Javert could have argued with her but what was the point? Her mind was made up and he always felt ridiculous arguing with a child.

"Very well," he said simply, secure in the knowledge that calling it one thing or another wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference.


	17. Chapter 17

Valjean was leaving Sunday Mass when a well-dressed women strolled up to him with a wide smile. She was trailing a child about Cosette's age with her. "Monsieur le Maire! How lovely to see you."

Valjean smiled automatically and nodded his head.

"We have never been properly introduced but of course we all feel like we know you since you are our beloved mayor," the woman continued. "My name is Christine Monceaux and this is my daughter, Adele."

Adele smiled shyly. "Hello."

Cosette glanced up at him before smiling back. "I am Cosette."

"Do you think that it would be alright if Adele and Cosette played while we talk?" Madame Monceaux asked.

Valjean hesitated. He would not be rude with this woman but he did not wish to engage in idle conversation with her and so he would prefer to be able to leave as quickly as politeness dictated. If Cosette were off playing with another child then it would make it harder to leave but she was looking so hopefully at him that how could he possibly refuse?

"Certainly," he said mildly.

Cosette beamed up at him before gesturing for Adele to follow her and running off. Adele quickly did as was requested but they stopped still within eyesight.

"Children make friends so easily," Madame Monceaux said happily as she watched them go. "I wish we could keep that. But alas, as we get older…" She looked over at Valjean for some sort of response.

"Indeed."

"I do hope that you and Cosette are settling in together nicely. You always look so happy when I see you together," Madame Monceaux told him.

"We are," Valjean agreed, uncertain of where she was going with this. He did enjoy speaking of Cosette but why would this woman wish to do so? Did she want to speak of her daughter as well? Why had she approaching him?

Madame Monceaux looked overly pleased at having managed to get two words from him. "I know that she must have had a terrible time of it, being away from her poor mother all that time. And then for that poor woman to be so sick and to finally die! At least Cosette was with her then and the child will remember her mother. The whole situation just broke my heart."

Valjean smiled uncertainly. He did not remember anyone being overly concerned with Fantine's plight in the past but then, how much did people truly know of it? Would someone as well-off as Madame Monceaux have even heard of it before Valjean himself had and he had intervened? Many of the people involved in her fall, himself included, had had no idea what they were doing to that brave young woman. There was no reason to assume that she was not serious. Many would hesitate before bursting into the sickroom of a stranger.

"You truly are a saint, Monsieur Madeleine," Madame Monceaux declared.

"I am but a man, Madame, and am as flawed as anyone despite my attempts to do good," Valjean corrected her gently.

"Of course you are," Madame Monceaux said matter-of-factly, her subtle look of triumph growing with every word he said. "Everyone is. What does that have to do with me calling you a saint?"

"Saints are…" Valjean trailed off. "Saints are people who are good beyond reason. I try to do good but I am too flawed to be among their number."

"I will not ask you to start listing off your flaws in order to try and convince me, Monsieur le Maire," Madame Monceaux said with a little laugh. "Saints are just as human as any of us. If they weren't they wouldn't be saints but angels. It would not be difficult, I do not believe, for someone who is perfect to be good so we would not have to admire them the way we do saints. To be a saint you achieve an unusual virtuousness but you have to struggle first. I must confess that I have seen no great struggle from you but your protests of being flawed make me imagine that it is there just the same."

That was certainly true. It became easier as the years went by to do good and to strive towards being a good person but he still knew that he had a long way to go. He rather doubted he would ever not have a long way to go but he had known that when he had first started down this road.

"You do so much good for everyone with nary a thought to yourself. You give away most of your fortune and, no matter how much you might love her now, you agreed to raise a little girl because she had no one else in the world," Madame Monceaux continued. "You need not argue with me on this point, Monsieur! I think another mark of a saint is to not believe that they are a saint. Can you imagine the hubris of a man who truly believes such a thing about himself?"

"So my best chance of not being seen as a saint is to go around proclaiming myself one?" Valjean asked, puzzled. He looked longingly over at Cosette but she seemed to be happy sneaking up on a bird with Adele.

Madame Monceaux laughed again. "Well, it would in my eyes. You are very well-respected, Monsieur le Maire, so you would surely have some people who would take your word for it."

"So there is no way not to have at least someone thinking that I am a saint," Valjean mused, sighing.

It made him uncomfortable that people would think that. He knew that they would not be thinking of a literal saint but it made him feel like a fraud. Yes he did a great deal of good in town (not all of which they were even aware of) but he had a lot to make up for as well. If these people knew about Toulon they would not say that he was so good. He hoped that he was not being uncharitable in fearing that they would not care about any of the good he had done if they knew but from the moment he had been arrested all anybody had been able to see was the fact that he had broke the law. Why should this place be any different? Yes he had not done as much good anybody else and was not seen as almost a saint but a convict was a convict and convicts were not, could never be, saints.

"Perhaps not," Madame Monceaux agreed, smiling. "It is alright, though. You should not put too much weight in what other people believe. Sometimes words can destroy a person but I do not believe you to be so vulnerable. Let people think you are a saint. There are worse things people can think about you."

Valjean remembered the whispers he had heard when he had consented to show the inexplicably curious his sparse chambers. "That is true."

"Oh, look at how well Adele and Cosette are getting along!" Madame Monceaux exclaimed. "I do hope that they will be able to be friends."

She was looking pointedly at him again so he just smiled her way.

"Adele has a governess so I'm afraid that she will not see Cosette at school," Madame Monceaux said regretfully. "And I really would like to give them the chance to spend time together. I do not know how it is with Cosette but my Adele is just too solitary. And you can never have enough friends."

"That is true," Valjean agreed.

He did not think he had ever actually had a friend. There had been no time for it when he was younger and worried about living to see the next year for as long as he could remember, before he was even old enough to work. There was no such thing as friends in Toulon. The closest thing to it, he supposed, were those who got too close to each other and traded on protection but that was nothing like the sweet friendships Cosette had developed with so many young girls. She had recently declared that he and Javert were friends. It was true that he spoke with Javert about as much as he spoke with anybody and Javert had come over to dinner more than once but the man had spent multiple years (who knew how long after meeting Madeleine he had started to suspect?) trying to prove that he was Jean Valjean. Even now, Javert would never cease trying to incarcerate him if he knew the truth. Were they friends? They were as close as he was ever going to be able to get, he supposed.

Truthfully, he did not need friends though Cosette seemed to appreciate having them.

"Oh, I know!" Madame Monceaux exclaimed. "It will be Christmas soon and my husband and I are having a celebration in a week's time. If you could bring Cosette then she and Adele could play together. Celebrations can be so much fun for children if they have a friend there and no one is always telling them to stay out of the way."

Valjean stiffened. "I do thank you for your offer, Madame Monceaux, but I do not think that that is a good idea."

Madame Monceaux did not look surprised. Of course she wouldn't be. Valjean had been receiving offers such as this one since he had first begun to gain prominence as a factory owner and before he had even become mayor. He had not accepted a single one and, sooner or later, people accepted that.

"Why not?" she asked anyway.

"I really am a private person," Valjean told her. "Celebrations, I'm afraid, hold little enjoyment for me."

Madame Monceaux nodded. "Oh, I quite understand! Two years ago – or was it three? – I was feeling rather ill during this same party. My head was traitorously attempting to murder me and I could not keep any food down but it was a celebration at my house and so I was obliged to attend."

"The celebration is not at my home," Valjean pointed out.

"Yes and presumably you will be feeling just fine," Madame Monceaux agreed. "It is not about that. I know that going will be a sacrifice but I am really thinking of little Cosette."

"Cosette?" Valjean repeated.

Madame Monceaux nodded innocently. "Oh, yes. In addition to the chance she will have to spend time with her new friend and perhaps meet some others, she cannot possibly have ever been to a celebration like this living with poor innkeepers in…Montfermeil, was it? And as you are such an important and distinguished man, your daughter will need to get used to going to such events sooner or later and it is far easier when you are younger to learn how to behave than when you are older. People are also far more willing to forgive lapses in a child than in a young woman."

"I do not think that she will need to," Valjean attempted to protest. For of course Cosette could not attend any such events before she was married unless he was there and that was something he would rather avoid. Besides, Cosette had not expressed the slightest interest in going to a society event. She might not have even heard of them.

"It is one thing if you do not care to attend such events, Monsieur le Maire, but think of Cosette! If she ever wants to marry some respectable gentleman then how else will she meet someone?" Madame Monceaux asked rhetorically. "Shall she sit at home and hope that one wanders into her garden one night? Maybe the brothers of her school friends will catch her eye. I'm sure they are all very nice people but would you, with the millions you have made and given away, really want your daughter to marry some poor boy?"

Valjean frowned at her. "There is nothing wrong with poor young men."

He had been one, once, before his crime and his nephews, if they still lived, would be poor young men as well. He would not be one to dismiss a man just because he did not have money. He could see, though not fully understand, that this would be a matter of unthinkable horror for the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy. He would not raise Cosette to look down on people like her mother.

"Of course not," Madame Monceaux agreed easily. "But you have raised Cosette up from poverty to comfort. Would you really condemn her back down to that? If she falls in love with a poor boy then she falls in love with a poor boy and you might be so generous as to give her a healthy dowry they can live off of for the rest of her life but do you really want that to be inevitable? If she does not meet any suitable young men then that will be her fate. And it's not just money! Society will not receive Madame le Gardener."

"Is it so important that she be involved with society?" Valjean asked. He would not see her denied anything but not having to go to those things did not really feel like a bad thing. Perhaps it was because he was old and a convict. Enough people seemed to enjoy them so as to keep having them and Cosette might even be one of them, if given the opportunity. Madame Monceaux was right in that it would be unacceptable for Cosette to have come so far only to be condemned to poverty again but he was even now siphoning off a small portion of his profits to add to her dowry so she would not need to worry about marrying money. "Not being so has never harmed me."

"You are a man, Monsieur le Maire, and you hold an important position in our town. Two, in fact," Madame Monceaux pointed out. "It would be different for her. If she does not want society she does not have to have it but would you really condemn her to not having that option because you will not attend my celebration?"

"I think that you are getting a little ahead of yourself," Valjean told her. "Her life will not be ruined if she is not received by society and she need not marry some penniless beggar off the street because she does not attend your celebration."

"Perhaps not," she conceded. "But why take the risk? It is just one evening and it will be fun. It will certainly help her along when she's older and longing to attend balls of her own."

The thought of Cosette growing up and wanting to attend balls and getting married, no matter who she was married to, was quite overwhelming. He took another look at that little girl. That was a long, long way off certainly. No doubt he would be better prepared as the time approached.

"I suppose that there is no harm in attending the one gathering, for Cosette's sake," Valjean said reluctantly. "She does not know what such things are like and I would not want her to miss out because I do not enjoy such things myself." For that matter, he did not know what they were like, only that there would be a lot of people there who would want to talk about things that were not business and would therefore be a miserable affair he would dearly love to escape.

Madame Monceaux smiled almost impossibly widely at him. "Oh, that is excellent news! You may say that I am exaggerating and perhaps I do have a tendency to do that but nothing bad ever came from attending a celebration."

Valjean looked once more over at Cosette. Surely they had played together enough and Cosette would see her in a week. Now that her mother had gotten what she wanted out of him, perhaps they could finally leave.

"I do have to wonder about your plans for Cosette," Madame Monceaux said.

"My plans?" Valjean asked, startled. "What do you mean?"

"If this were Paris then I would assume that you would send her to a convent," Madame Monceaux continued. She tilted her head. "Though perhaps not if you are truly fond of having her with you. Do you intend to keep her at the free school? Will you be engaging a governess at some point?"

"Why would I need a governess for Cosette?" Valjean asked blankly. "The free school is educating her and I have ensured that it provides a very good education."

"For some things, yes," Madame Monceaux said delicately though it was clear that she was refraining from saying something. "But what about things such as playing the piano or learning to dance? Where will she learn the things that will make her an accomplished young lady?"

Valjean frowned. "You will have to forgive me. I have no experience with accomplished young ladies. Is it terribly important for them to know how to do these things?"

"It is, yes," Madame Monceaux said promptly.

"Why?"

"Because such things are how society judges women, ladies, of worth from those that are consigned to…less grandeur," Madame Monceaux told him. "I know that it might seem rather silly to you but I trust that I shall be able to show you the value of such things beginning with the celebration."

There was something vaguely ominous with the way that she said 'beginning.'

Mercifully, Cosette soon ran over with Adele trailing behind her.

"Papa, will I be able to play with Adele again soon?" she asked hopefully.

"Yes," Valjean said, feeling a little bit better about all of this now that it was going to make Cosette happy. "We are going to a celebration at her house next week."

"A celebration?" Cosette asked, intrigued. "How exciting!"

"It was good to make your acquaintance, Madame Monceaux," Valjean told her politely.

"And yours, Monsieur le Maire," she responded cheerfully.

"Come Cosette, let us return home," Valjean said, trying not to think about the ordeal to come.


	18. Chapter 18

Madame Monceaux's celebration had been a very trying affair for Valjean. She had looked far more pleased at his presence than he thought reasonable and his attendance had only started a renewal of the sorts of invitations he had gotten back when he had first become mayor and thus been considered good enough to be included in their plans.

It was so strange. None of these people knew or could ever know that once he had been a convict. He had tried to admit it once before but he was guiltily relieved that he had not been believed. That had been a strange sensation, certainly, knowing that he had come so far and changed so much that no one could associate his own past with him. No one but Javert, perhaps, and even he had changed his mind relatively easily. If Valjean had ever felt as strongly about something as Javert seemed to have felt about him being Valjean then he wouldn't have changed his mind just because someone told him he was wrong. To be fair to Javert, he had waited until he had seen the man that they claimed was actually Valjean and Champmathieu did look a great deal like he had once looked. But it was a strange and not altogether pleasant sensation to be so irrevocably far from who he had once been.

He had no desire to live as Jean Valjean, of course, not really but to no longer even have the option of confessing…

But that did not matter. Those fine upstanding members of society had been the sorts of people he had never even known existed, not properly, until he had arrived in Montreuil and begun to make good. They did not know much of his life but they knew that he was a simple laborer when he had arrived and thus beneath their notice. That they had seen him rise so high and so quickly (that they were probably some of the ones who had encouraged it for how else would he have received so much frankly alarming attention from the king himself without their encouragement?) and then welcomed him into their sphere was both puzzling and somewhat heartening.

He did not want to be one of them and, more than that, he could not afford to be but the only detail missing from their account of him was his past as a convict. It was a pretty big detail and should it ever get out, unlikely as it was now, it would ruin everything. But just who he was before his arrest, who his family no doubt were if they still lived, that they would have been accepted if they had just managed to get their hands on a little money…it was a hopeful thought. Money was difficult to come by but it was easier to do that than to change the situation you were born into.

These wealthy people who had been born with a bright future promised to them had looked at his prosperity and did not concern themselves with how common he truly was (if only that were true). He had turned down as many of the invitations he had been flooded with as he could but it had, perhaps, been a mistake to step down from his position of never attending social functions and now there would be more to attend.

Perhaps it would get easier in time. Fortunately, his old discovery that if he just smiled politely and looked interested they would do most of the talking for him continued to hold true. They seemed to delight in pulling words from him by asking questions but questions, at least, he could answer even if he had to lie or demur. Fortunately agreeing to take a step into society was not the same as offering up something about his past and so they appeared to have no more hope there than they ever had.

But Cosette had enjoyed herself immensely and that was really the important part and why he had let himself be talked into ever stepping foot into another society event ever again. He still did not think that Madame Monceaux had been correct in fearing that not attending society events would ruin Cosette's life but she had enjoyed playing with Adele and the other children she met that night. Cosette had suffered so much in the past and Fantine had suffered even more, some of which at Valjean's own hand, and so she deserved all of the happiness she could get. Valjean would be willing to suffer a great deal more than the awkwardness of a party in order to make her smile.

He hoped to make her smile today.

The night before, Cosette had almost self-consciously taken her shoes and put them by the fireplace. She seemed flustered that he was watching her and so he dutifully looked away. He was not sure what to think. She obviously knew the tradition of placing shoes by the fire at Christmas but what did that mean? He had not seen the Thénardiers inn for himself but he had Javert's highly critical report of the situation and the wretched condition that Cosette had been in when he had first seen her to give him a not very charitable opinion of those who were supposed to watch out for her. Had they been so greedy with the mother and neglectful with the daughter and still given her some form of a Christmas present? Or were the Thénardier daughters the ones who had received the presents and Cosette had not given up hope? That was painful to think about. Perhaps she had given up hope but now, in her new home with her new father, she dared to believe again?

Valjean was no stranger to giving Christmas presents. There had never been much money to give his own nieces and nephews anything, even before Henri had died, but for the past few years he had been breaking into the houses of some of the poorer families and playing the part of Père Noël for them. It was a nice reversal to be the thief that comes in the night to give rather than to take. He would say that did not make him a thief at all but the law would have him be a thief whenever he did anything.

He had not given a gift openly in quite some time.

He rose early, as was his custom, and sat by the fire waiting for Cosette to leave her room. There was no school today though it was a Thursday and the factory had been closed yesterday as well as today.

Finally, Cosette's door creaked open and she hesitantly stuck her head out. Valjean immediately pretended to be absorbed in the fire and oblivious to her presence and, after a moment, he heard her footsteps across the room. She made her way towards her shoes and let out a startled gasp of delight.

"Papa! Papa!" she cried out.

Valjean turned back towards her. "Yes, Cosette?"

Cosette picked up her shoes and ran over to him, practically shoving them in his face. "He came! Père Noël came!"

Valjean smiled gently at her. "Of course he came. It is Christmas, is it not?"

Cosette turned her smiling face down to her shoes which were full of treats. "I always used to hope that he would. He came for Zelma and Ponine every year but not for me. They always used to say it was because I was bad."

"That wasn't it," Valjean said, fiercer than he intended.

Cosette turned startled eyes towards him. "Then why didn't he come?"

What could he say? He had put the presents in Cosette's shoes this year and the Thénardiers had not bothered to in years past but he could hardly break a child's faith in Père Noël like that! Especially not this child's faith.

"Perhaps he did not know where you were," Valjean suggested lamely. "You were staying at an inn with people who were not your family."

Cosette seemed to accept this explanation, however, and smiled brighter. "Can I see what's inside?"

"Of course you may," Valjean told her. "Then we will have breakfast and you can decide what else you would like to do with the day."

Cosette sat down right there on the floor and stuck her hand almost tentatively in one of her shoes. There was chocolate and a few coins as well as a doll made out of straw and coconut. There was a new dress for her favorite doll, Catherine, and a silk hair ribbon.

"This is all so wonderful!" Cosette exclaimed happily. "This is the best Christmas I've ever had."

Valjean chuckled. "I am glad that Père Noël did not disappoint."

Cosette set her presents down and looked seriously up at him. "I like all of this but even if I did not get anything it would still be the best Christmas ever because I am here with you and not there with them."

Given the state that she had been in before, it was perhaps not a ringing endorsement to be better than that but it touched Valjean anyway. He held out his arms and Cosette practically flew into them. She kissed him on the cheek before she pulled back.

"After breakfast do you think that we can…" she faltered.

"Yes, please go on," Valjean said encouragingly.

Cosette took a deep breath and seemed to gather her courage. "Do you think we could go and visit my mother's grave?"

Valjean drew back quickly and, on seeing the alarm on Cosette's face, quickly smiled at her in reassurance. To think that she would be afraid to ask to visit her own mother's grave! It was true that they had not really been to see Fantine's grave since shortly after her burial but she had not asked and he had not wanted to force her. He did not know a great deal about proper mourning traditions. There had never been much time for such sentimentality when he was younger and struggling with the world to survive. It was one of those things that had just slipped away but clearly Cosette had not wanted it to.

"Of course we can," he promised her. "Any time you want to go see your mother, tell me and we will go."

Cosette's answering smile may have been a bit watery but it was a happy one.

\----

"Look!" Cosette said as they neared the cemetery, pointing to a figure in front of them. "It is Inspector Javert! Hello, Inspector Javert!"

Javert turned at the sound of her voice and obligingly walked over to them. "Cosette, Monsieur Madeleine."

"Are you out on patrol, Javert?" Valjean asked politely.

Javert nodded. "Of course."

"But it's Christmas," Cosette said, uncomprehendingly.

"If the police took that attitude and all stayed home celebrating then think of all the havoc the criminal classes would wreak and all of those broken laws with no one to defend them," Javert told her.

"I think the criminals would want to be home with their families as well," Cosette said with certainty. "I think that Christmas may be my favorite day."

"Children often do," Javert said shortly.

"Sometimes criminals don't have families, Cosette, especially if they have been to prison for a long time and their family moved away," Valjean informed her. "And sometimes Christmas makes people even more desperate to steal something so that their family might have a happier Christmas and not starve or freeze like they must the rest of the winter."

Javert adopted that same look he always did whenever Valjean dared to say anything implying crime was committed for any reason besides bad morals and a disregard for society. "There does tend to be more crime committed in the winter months," he conceded grudgingly.

Valjean nodded. "Of course. The winter is hard and work scarcer even in good times let alone when there is a famine."

"And so you can see why, even if your father were correct, I must patrol the streets to stop people from stealing or getting into fights or killing each other," Javert said, turning back to Cosette.

"Are you the only one patrolling today?" Cosette asked.

"I am."

"Then you let everyone else go home and celebrate with their families while you made sure people didn't do bad things," Cosette said.

"That is…one way to look at it," Javert said stiffly.

Cosette smiled at him. "That was really nice of you, Inspector Javert."

Javert looked put-out. "People focus better when they are not sulking about missing Christmas and I do not need distracted patrolmen. I might as well not have any patrolmen at all if they aren't going to pay attention."

But Cosette kept smiling at him like she knew a secret and Javert quickly excused himself.

"Why does he always pretend he's not nice?" Cosette wondered as they resumed their walk. She paused and corrected herself. "I mean, he's not nice all the time. But sometimes he is like this and he hides it."

Valjean was capable of thinking many positive things about the man who had once just been another hated guard to him and it never ceased to amaze him and reassure him that he had really and truly changed. Kindness was not something he generally associated with Javert, however, and his 'it is easy to be kind' speech rang in his ears.

"The law, as you know, is often not kind and Javert places a huge value on following and enforcing the law," Valjean said slowly. "If someone is starving and steals a loaf of bread to eat then it would be kind to let him have it if you really don't need it but it would be against the law. He does not want to be seen as kind, I think, because then he is worried people will try and take advantage. He does not want to be kind and often isn't but it would be very difficult indeed to never be kind, even if that kindness is also the practical or lawful thing to do like here."

Cosette nodded. "That's really sad."

"It is," Valjean agreed. "But it is what he wants and you cannot force somebody into appreciating the good things in life."

"I hope that he gets better," Cosette said sincerely, as though Javert disliking kindness was some sort of illness to recover from. And who knew? Perhaps it was.

Cosette grabbed his hand when they reached the cemetery and made their way to Fantine's grave. Cosette looked all around her as if she had never seen any of this before.

Valjean was not overly fond of cemeteries himself. They were very still and peaceful but they reminded him of those who had died and driven him closer to death himself and those who even now might be dead and how their deaths might be his fault. He would never see their graves, if they even had graves. One day, when he felt it was safer years and years in the future, he might return to Faverolles and see the graves that were there. They were nothing expensive or particularly noticeable but they would still be there unchanging when everything else had passed him by.

Those were depressing thoughts but this was a cemetery. He shook them off as best he could and turned his attention back towards his daughter.

Cosette had kneeled down in front of the grave and wiped the snow off of it. She looked up at him. "I don't know what you do at graves. Am I supposed to talk?"

"You can talk if you'd like to."

Cosette nodded. "Hello, Mama. It's Christmas. I got a lot of presents and it was really wonderful. Père Noël came for me this year. It was snowing and I like the snow. I played outside. Mathieu threw a snowball at me and made me cry but he said he was sorry and was just trying to play a game. Then we all threw snowballs at each other and I got hit again but it was fine and I didn't get sad again. I miss you, Mama. We never got to have a Christmas together except maybe when I was a baby. I wish you didn't die."

Valjean knelt down beside her and put his arm around her.

She leaned into him. "Papa, can you cover your ears?"

Puzzled, Valjean did as she requested.

When she was satisfied that his ears were covered, though he could still hear perfectly fine, she whispered, "I wish you didn't die, Mama. I miss you. But if you did then I'm happy you found such a wonderful papa for me. He's the best papa in the world and I love him so much and I love you so much and I dreamed that the three of us could just be happy forever. Papa and I will be happy here and you be happy in heaven, alright? We'll come see you one day but not for a very, very long time."

With that, she tugged on his sleeves and Valjean removed his hands from his ears. "Yes?"

"I'm done now," she told him seriously. "Do you have anything you want to say to Mama?"

Valjean considered. He had had many weeks in which to say everything he might have had to say to Fantine to her face. The guilt lingered but he could hardly apologize to Fantine for his part in destroying her in front of her daughter. Still, Cosette was looking expectantly at him.

"Fantine," he said quietly. "I hope that you have found peace in the embrace of our Lord. I made a vow to you to do everything I could to raise your child to the light and I am doing my best to fulfill that vow. She makes it so easy since she is such a wonderful and loving child. You have a very special daughter and I will do what I can to give her the life you dreamed she would have."

He lapsed into silence then and, despite the cold and the snow, they knelt there at Fantine's grave for quite some time.


	19. Chapter 19

One night, Valjean's eyes snapped open as he heard someone walking around. He did not think that he had ever been a light sleeper. If that wasn't true then he had certainly learned to wake easily in Toulon. Oh, he had quickly learned how to sleep through what had once seemed an unbearably loud noise each night but he had had to be on his guard even whilst sleeping and wake up immediately if something changed. He did not want to fall prey to an irate guard or an overly-bold convict.

But this was not Toulon. This was Montreuil and he was the mayor. Javert had been the only one to ever suspect the seemingly respectable man he was now of being that terrible convict from years ago and miles and miles away and he would never commit the crime of house-breaking in order to try and prove it. And there was Champmathieu anyway. If someone wished to rob him, not that he much to steal, they need only wait until he was gone during the day and not come at night.

There was no reason for anyone to be here.

He sat up and quickly lit a candle before going out into the hall to see what had woken him.

He saw Cosette moving slowly and wrapping rag-laden arms around herself.

"Cosette?" Valjean asked, concerned.

Cosette blinked dazedly at him. "I'm sorry, Papa."

That alarmed him. "Cosette, what's wrong?"

Cosette unwrapped her arms and held the rags up for him to see. "I made a mess."

"Surely it can wait until morning!" Valjean exclaimed.

But Cosette shook her head, wincing a little as she did so. "No. If you wait until morning it just gets harder to clean. It's better to do it now."

Valjean hated to think of how she had acquired that knowledge. Little children should not be expected to clean like they were servants.

"Cosette, do not concern yourself with that," Valjean said gently, moving closer to her and taking the rags out of her hands.

"But-"

"What happened? What mess did you make that you must now clean up in the middle of the night?" Valjean asked.

"I…" Cosette brought her hands up to cover her face.

Valjean slipped his hand into hers. "Show me."

Cosette brought her other hand down reluctantly and nodded. She led him to her room where he could smell the vomit before he could see it. Fortunately it was on the floor and a little bit of the wall and not on the bed itself or on Cosette.

Still, Cosette was such a healthy child despite what the Thénardiers said and so, after many months, this was the first time he had seen any sign of her being ill. And she hadn't woken him or wanted him to even know, preferring instead to try and clean the mess by herself when she was sick. How long had she been ill? Had she been ill before and just never told him? How could he have not noticed this?

Cosette had been pointedly staring down at the ground but she chanced a look up at his face, bit her lip, and quickly looked down again. What had she seen there?

"Are you alright, Cosette?" Valjean demanded.

Cosette nodded shakily. "Y-Yes, I am. I just couldn't help it. I'm sorry."

What would the Thénardiers have done if Cosette still lived with them? Cleaning it up quietly in the middle of the night and hoping that nobody ever knew was probably her safest option.

Valjean bent down so that he was eye-to-eye with his daughter. "Cosette, you never have to apologize for being sick. When you are ill, other people are supposed to care for you."

"Like you?" Cosette asked.

Valjean nodded, relieved that she was not going to try and argue about it. Cosette did not argue much as a general rule but if she did not understand or agree about something then she did not always accept it and so it would really be easier if she did argue.

"Like me."

"When you're ill, will I take care of you?" Cosette asked curiously.

"I don't get ill," Valjean told her.

"Everyone gets ill," Cosette said seriously.

"Maybe when you're older," Valjean said, smiling indulgently. "Right now if I get ill and need any help then I will get a doctor or Madame Martin."

Cosette considered this. "Alright. Are you going to get Madame Martin now?"

Valjean shook his head. "It is too early to wake her up."

"You're awake," Cosette pointed out.

"I am already awake."

Cosette looked down again. "I do not want you to have to clean up my mess."

Valjean kissed her forehead and started to lead her away from her room and into his. "You do not have to worry about that. I like taking care of you, Cosette. I am your father."

Cosette looked unconvinced but allowed herself to be tucked into bed all the same. "But where will you sleep?"

"Do not worry about me, Cosette," Valjean said, touched at her concern just the same. Was it wrong to be glad that there was someone who would worry about him, even if it was entirely unnecessary? As long as he told her that she did not need to then it was okay, perhaps. It was not as though he were unused to sleeping without a bed and the floor here was much softer than the wood or stone he had used before. And if nothing else, there were always the chairs. He had gotten some that were more comfortable after Cosette insisted on sitting on them all the time and he did not want her to be uncomfortable.

"I have to worry about you," Cosette said pragmatically. "I love you."

His smile grew at that. "And that is precisely why I do not want you to worry."

She yawned. "I do not want you to worry, either, but you always do."

"Ah, but I am the father."

"And I am the daughter," Cosette murmured.

Valjean made no reply and just watched as she drifted off to sleep. Even after all this time, he never tired of the sight or ceased to marvel that someone so innocent could trust him enough to let down all of her defenses and drift off when he was right there. She may not know of his past (would never know of his past if he could help it) and so she only knew the man he was now and that was good enough for her.

Eventually, he stood up and went to go get the rags that he realized he had dropped in Cosette's room. He had not had to do this in quite some time but evidently cleaning vomit up was one of those things that you just never forgot how to do. He would not go so far as to say that he enjoyed having to do it now as it was really an unpleasant task but he did not mind and he truly did not want Madame Martin to have this unfortunate surprise in the morning as well as her usual duties. He would never allow Cosette to have to do this.

When he was done, he cleaned himself off and rinsed the rags off as best he could before going off to see if he could get a little more sleep before he needed to begin the day.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fortunately, Madame Martin knew much more about taking care of sick children than he did. He supposed his nieces and nephews must have been sick at some point before he was taken away (probably fairly often given how poor they were) but he simply could not remember and doubted that he had much to do with taking care of them then anyway. That would have been Jeanne's duty while he was trying to keep them from starving.

She made Cosette some plain toast and some tea and suggested that Cosette stay in bed that day.

Cosette had looked almost frightened at the suggestion but Valjean thought that it was a good idea. He did have responsibilities but nothing so pressing that he could not have someone bring him important paperwork and delegate what he could not do tomorrow or whenever Cosette was feeling better. He did not think he would be able to concentrate with Cosette sick and out of his reach when he wanted to look in on her anyway.

He read to her and played with Catherine with her before lunch and afterwards he got some work done while she took a nap.

He walked by her room again and saw that she was awake and looking surprisingly serious.

"Cosette?"

"Is this how people are supposed to be sick?" she asked him.

Valjean thought that this might be a long conversation and probably a difficult one as well and so he entered her room and sat down at the edge of her bed. "What do you mean?"

"I've never been sick like this before," Cosette revealed. "Sometimes Ponine and Zelma were sick and stayed in bed but I thought that was because they were ladies. Does everyone do this?"

"Everyone that can afford to," Valjean said. "Sometimes if you are really poor you still have to get up no matter how bad you are feeling and do your work but you are a little child and we are more comfortable than that and so you should stay in bed until you feel better."

"They always had debt," Cosette said slowly. "They worked really hard and made me work even harder. But they never had no food or nice clothes for Ponine and Zelma. They never had to have them help me work. They could have been nicer."

'Nicer.' Well that was one word for it.

"Cosette…"

"We never talk about them," Cosette noted.

"No," agreed Valjean. What could he possibly say about it? It was not as if he had a great deal of experience in talking about his own painful past though sometimes he wanted to. It was foolish and naïve, of course. It was alright for him to go on about it to the bishop when they had first met before he had known the bishop as anyone but just another person soon to reject him because then he was still Jean Valjean. Monsieur Madeleine had no such luxury. "Would you like to?"

Cosette tilted her head. "I do not know."

"Cosette, I promise you that anything you ever want to tell me, anything at all, is something that I will want to hear," Valjean vowed.

Cosette gave him a watery smile. Would she never stop breaking his heart?

"Why?"

He was about to reply that it was because he was her father and that is what fathers did, or at least should do, when it occurred to him that wasn't what she was asking.

"Why what, Cosette?" he asked.

"You say that my mother loved me," she said softly. "I know that that is true. She really loved me when I came here and was so worried about who would love me when she died. When I was a baby she must have loved me, too."

"She did," Valjean said automatically though of course he had no more firsthand knowledge of this than Cosette did.

"And you love me, too. You take really good care of me. But the Thénardiers didn't. They hurt me and didn't give me anything that they didn't have to. They sent me out in the woods all the time for water with a bucket that was bigger than me. They were…they were bad," Cosette finished, twisting her quilt in her hands.

"I'm sorry." What else could he say?

Cosette looked confused. "It's not your fault and you saved me. You saved my mother, too. You're good. But I don't know why they were so bad. Why were they so good to their own daughters but couldn't be nice to me?"

"I don't know," Valjean said helplessly. Even at his worst, it was the thought of hurting a child (of stealing from Petit Gervais which still haunted him no matter what the boy himself might say of it today) that always got to him. He had done his best to help raise seven for as long as he could and if he could have afforded an eighth one, let alone been paid to take care of it, he wouldn't have turned that one away. "But you have to believe, Cosette, that it was not your fault. It was because they were not good and had nothing to do with you."

"Really?" Cosette asked in a small voice.

"Really," Valjean reassured her. "You are a wonderful little girl and they didn't realize how lucky they were to have you."

"I still dream about those days sometimes," Cosette admitted. "A few nights ago I had a dream that Madame Thénardier came here and took me away."

"She will never hurt you again. More than likely, you will never even see her again but even if you do she can do nothing to you," Valjean said firmly. "I will protect you from her and her husband and whoever else you need protection from."

"I know," Cosette said, smiling. "I used to worry but now it's just when I sleep that I can't remember."

"What happened to you was very bad but it doesn't make you bad," Valjean continued. "And you and I are going to stay here and be happy."

"I like that," Cosette said. "Back in Montfermeil, I never could have dreamed of such a life! I think I might have been becoming bad then."

"Nonsense."

"I used to cut the heads off of flies," Cosette told him. "I never knew that I shouldn't. And I tried to love them but I couldn't. I hated them. And I'm told that good little girls shouldn't lie but I used to lie all the time. I said things like 'I already watered your horse' or 'of course I didn't steal bread from the kitchen.'"

Stealing bread. He did not think a child would be thrown into prison but the Thénardiers would not have been kind.

"Did they believe you?"

Cosette looked away. "No. But there was always a chance."

"Cosette, you were just a child doing the best you could in a terrible situation," Valjean told her. "It was never your fault that you were there. I think you were not as bad as you think you were. You certainly were not bad when I met you only a little while after leaving the Thénardiers. But even if you were it was their job to raise you better and not to force you to that."

"I didn't know how bad it was until things got better. I'm scared of who I would be when I grew up if you hadn't saved me," Cosette admitted.

"Sometimes loving people is hard," Valjean said gently. "Loving you was never hard, though. When people are mean to you and hurt you then it can be the hardest thing in the world to just not hate them, let alone love them. Do not blame yourself that you could not love those that hurt you."

"Would you have hated them if it was you?" Cosette asked him quietly.

"Now…I don't think so. I do not think that I could ever hate anybody as long as I have you with me," Valjean replied. "But before…I was not always the man I am today. I did hate, once, though I regret that fact now. There is nothing we can do about the past and we must move forward and try to be better."

"I can do that," Cosette agreed. "But I think that you were not as bad as you think, either."

Oh, the sweet innocence of a child! He had seen her so very shortly after leaving the Thénardiers that he could not imagine that she had changed much. And she was a child! Nineteen years in Toulon after a lifetime of struggle and deprivation was quite another matter but he had no desire to correct her misapprehension.

"Perhaps," he said neutrally. He wondered if he should say the next part. He hardly wanted to encourage lying in the girl but just the same he did not want her to have need of falsehood one day and not be able to utilize it. He had often wondered why Fantine had not taken Cosette to Montreuil with her and claimed that she was a widow or Cosette was her niece or something of the like. Had she not wanted to disclaim her child? Had she feared no one would believe her? The truth had come out somehow and she had not been able or willing to lie to them. "But as to lying, that is not always a sin, my child."

Cosette's eyes widened. "It isn't?"

"You should not lie to hurt others or to spare yourself in most cases," Valjean clarified, wondering if she was too young for this. "If you broke a window and I asked you who did it you should not pretend it was not you. But if it is important, really important, then there is nothing wrong with lying."

Cosette looked confused. "Like when?"

"Let us pretend that a man gets very angry and wants to kill another man," Valjean said slowly. "Pretend that this second man is trying to hide so that he will not die. If he runs past you and hides and you know where he is hiding and the first man asks you where he is, do you suppose that the right thing to do is to tell him the truth and let him kill the man?"

Cosette was quiet for a long moment, thinking it over. "No."

"Exactly. Don't lie about small things or people will not trust you and that is bad but if it is important to lie, I don't want you to get in trouble one day and not be able to lie to save yourself."

Cosette nodded. "I think I understand."

"Good," Valjean said. "I hope you never are in a situation like that and I will do my best to make it so but you can never know what the future holds."


	20. Chapter 20

Valjean sat at his desk waiting for Javert to receive his message and come see him. He did not want to have this conversation. He knew that Javert would not understand and would probably renew his efforts to protect him from himself or whatever his strange rationale had been. They needed to talk about this, however. He could not just leave town for a few days without letting the head of his small police force (as well as several other people) know and he was going to have to provide some sort of explanation or probably arouse Javert's suspicions again even with Javert's beliefs that his superiors should not answer to him. Not that this had ever prevented him from giving his superiors instructions if he did not feel they were behaving as they ought, of course, or at least it had never stopped him with Valjean.

Javert knocked twice on the door.

"Come in."

Javert entered, his hat in his hands. "Monsieur le Maire," he said, bowing.

"Welcome, Javert," Valjean said. "I'm leaving in two days."

Javert frowned. "Leaving?"

"Not permanently," Valjean assured him. "Not even for very long, I shouldn't wonder. Just however long it takes me to travel to Toulon and back and perhaps a day or two longer than that to conduct my business and rest and before starting the return trip. I do not wish to be away from Cosette for long."

"What bus-" Javert started to ask before stopping and staring at him. "You are leaving Cosette here?"

Valjean nodded. "Do you take issue with that?"

"No, of course not," Javert said. "You are her father and she is yours to do with as you like. Many children her age and younger survive well enough on the streets their whole lives and I am sure that you would not leave her so unattended."

"That is true," Valjean agreed. "I asked Madame Martin to watch over her for me and she has agreed. It will not be that much different from usual except I will not be there after work is over or to walk her to school in the mornings. She will miss me, I am sure, and I will miss her but it will not be long."

Javert clearly wanted to say something more.

"Speak," Valjean invited.

"It is just a little surprising that you would leave the girl behind," Javert admitted. "You seem…very attached to her."

"I am," Valjean said, nodding. "But Toulon is no place for a child."

"There are many children in Toulon," Javert said blandly. "People say it is quite nice, especially by the sea. Many respectable families like to go out to the sea. I am sure that Cosette would enjoy it as well."

"She can see the sea at some other time."

"What business is it that you could possibly have at Toulon that you do not want Cosette to be a part of?" Javert asked, almost suspiciously.

There was really no point in hiding it. Javert would find out sooner or later and he was doing nothing wrong by doing this. Or rather, he was given the whole situation but he had done what he could and he had to believe that this was not his fault. Or, if nothing else, he had to try.

"I am going to the prison at Toulon," Valjean said.

Javert's brow furrowed. "What business could such a respectable and goodly man such as yourself have in such a place? It is a place where the scum of society go, the undesirables who must be hidden away from the eyes of the just and made to pay for their crimes."

"Are there no just men or society in Toulon the town?" Valjean asked rhetorically. "It would seem to me that they see a great deal of these criminals."

"Oh, that is different," Javert insisted. "They are used to it so they do not feel it like other honest men would. If a criminal came to Montreuil then the whole town would be talking about it for weeks. If a man in Toulon sees a criminal it is only cause for concern if it is an escapee. That is why there are not allowed to be any convicts someplace where a member of the royal family might see them. What a thing it would be if the King himself were to get used to those wretches!"

"What a thing indeed," echoed Valjean.

"What is your purpose there?" Javert asked again.

"I am going to see Champmathieu," Valjean declared.

It was not some hasty decision on his part. He had been fighting the impulse on and off since the moment he had learned that his desperate and hateful journey to save an unfortunate stranger had all been for naught. He had been willing to condemn himself and lose everything he had (lose Cosette though he had not known and loved her yet) and even risk going back to Toulon and yet it had all been for nothing. His night of agony had been for nothing. It was not as though he did not relish the fact his sacrifice had not been necessary and God had evidently had other plans for him but just the same it was…it was not right. Champmathieu deserved to be judged for his own crimes, not Valjean's. He could have been the vilest of murderers and he would still not deserve Valjean's noose around his neck as well.

He did not want to go back to Toulon. He did not know if he even could, though this time the circumstances would be far more agreeable than the first time he went or the circumstances that he imagined that he might find himself back there in. But it could never be truly agreeable. He doubted even honest men would find it a pleasant place and certainly he would not, could not. No one would know it was him and even if they did there was nothing that anybody could do now that Champmathieu was named and imprisoned. But how could he face it?

How could he dare not after what was being done to Champmathieu that should have been done to him? No, it should have been done to no one but it was his fate and not Champmathieu's. He had thought, for a time, he was forgetting but he was beginning to realize that that was not to be. He would be haunted by this until he saw it for himself, it seemed. And perhaps then he would still be haunted or be haunted even stronger by the images and memories this visit caused and stirred. But wasn't that really the least bit of penance he could do? Toulon would not be his cage again and the least he could do was recognize what sort of a cage it was proving to Champmathieu.

"You mean that you are going to see Jean Valjean," Javert corrected, oblivious as usual to his inner turmoil. Or perhaps he was just choosing not to see it as Valjean was his superior.

"If I had meant that then I would have said that," Valjean argued. "You forget that I was there at his trial. I did not see all of it but I saw enough. I do not feel that the district attorney proved his case satisfactorily. I do not believe that that poor man is Jean Valjean."

"The law says that he is so he is," Javert said.

Valjean and Javert stared at each other for a moment.

Javert sighed. "But that is not enough convince you, is it?"

"No."

"I continue to fail to understand how such a good and upstanding man as you, one who has surely profited from the law keeping order, is so mistrustful of it," Javert said, shaking his head.

"I am not mistrustful," Valjean denied. "I just seem to care more for the individual than the law does. But as I must only deal with a finite number of people and the law must deal with literally everyone, perhaps that is not surprising."

Javert seemed to be struggling with himself about something. "Let us set aside the issue of whether or not he is truly Jean Valjean as I do not think that will be a productive conversation and ultimately it will change nothing as he will still be in prison serving Valjean's sentence."

Valjean looked down. "I know."

It was hard enough to think of Champmathieu being in Toulon when he was that old and feeble and very possibly innocent of everything. It was harder still to be reminded that he was serving Valjean's own sentence and every day of freedom and happiness he had with Cosette was bought at the cost of Champmathieu's unearned torture and slavery. But what could he do? He had tried. He was still trying. Surely God would forgive him his failure.

"What possible purpose could you have for going to visit Valjean in prison?" Javert demanded. "That man has nothing to do with you."

That was true. That almost made it worse since it was not as though meeting Valjean ruined Champmathieu's life but they did not even have to meet for Valjean to have ruined it. He had nothing to do with the initial arrest or the fact that Brevet had initially misidentified him and everyone else fell into line behind him but it was his own broken parole and missing status that had enabled this to happen in the first place.

"You did not think so once."

Javert narrowed his eyes. "Will you bring this up forever?"

"Only when we are discussing Champmathieu. I am…curious about the man you believed to be me," Valjean said slowly.

"Surely you assuaged your 'curiosity' when you went to his trial and confessed for him," Javert bit back.

"I need to see him in Toulon."

"You do not want to go to Toulon. You do not want to see the lengths that we must go to to contain and correct these despicable men," Javert warned.

Valjean smiled humorlessly. "I know that I do not. But I feel like I must go nonetheless. I owe him that much."

"You owe him nothing!" Javert exclaimed, looking scandalized.

"I'm afraid you're not going to change my mind, Javert, and surely one little visit is not going to be too much to bear?" Valjean asked rhetorically.

Javert sighed. "If it stays just one visit. But it is a waste of time and you have responsibilities here."

"I have arranged things very carefully so that the important things I have taken care of now or can take care of when I return and if anything important happens while I am gone it will be taken care of," Valjean explained. "It will be fine."

Javert sighed again. "Very well, Monsieur le Maire. Is there anything you would need of me? Why have you told me this personally? Will you be personally informing the rest of the town as well?"

"I had not planned on it though I have told certain other people who needed to know such as my foreman and forewoman," Valjean replied. "I wanted you to know because I will be gone for…I do not even know. More than a week, I should say."

"Considerably longer than I week I should say," Javert said dryly.

"I would appreciate it if, at some point, you could look in on Cosette," Valjean said. "I know you are very busy and I trust Madame Martin implicitly but I don't want her to get lonely and she likes you."

"I certainly have more pressing duties than keeping children you mistakenly believe like me entertained," Javert replied.

"I do not need you to watch her all the time! Just maybe stop by and see her once or twice or let her come by the station," Valjean said. "It would mean a lot to her and to me. And she does like you. I know that for a fact."

"How difficult is it to be liked by that child?" Javert challenged.

"That is neither here nor there," Valjean said smoothly. "So will I be able to count on you for this, Javert?"

Javert sighed. "I will see if I have time."

"Great," Valjean said, feeling almost cheerful all of a sudden. "I will let Madame Martin know that Cosette will be able to stop by."

\----

Telling Javert had, ironically, been the easy part but that was only because this next part was going to be so difficult.

He found Cosette standing on a stool so that she could be tall enough to reach the mantle and playing with his candlesticks. He had not thought that anyone could or would play with candlesticks but Cosette did so on a fairly regular basis.

"Cosette," he greeted her.

Cosette looked over with a smile. "I like your candlesticks. They're pretty."

Valjean couldn't help but return her smile, not the least because she appreciated the candlesticks though of course had no idea just what they meant to him.

"Where did you get them?" Cosette asked.

"A very good man gave them to me," Valjean told her vaguely. "He saved my life and wanted me to remember to be a good man."

"But you always remember," Cosette said, looking confused.

"It's easier now than it was," Valjean allowed, "but then I have the candlesticks to remind me!"

Cosette set the candlesticks down and patted the top of them. "Good candlesticks."

"Come here," Valjean said, beckoning to her.

Obediently, Cosette followed him and sat down on his lap when he took a seat.

"Cosette, I have something that I must do," Valjean said seriously.

Honestly, he was not quite sure how to tell Cosette this. It was one thing to tell Javert. Javert would be more likely to be suspicious of what he was doing in Toulon than anyone else but Javert's suspicions, as difficult as this was to believe, seemed to have died the moment he laid eyes on Champmathieu. What a strange thing when a stranger looked more like him than he himself did! Strange and sad and terrible. But what was it truly to Javert? Perhaps Javert would not like it if he left Montreuil forever (particularly if he took the industry and prosperity with him) or perhaps he would prefer a superior who was more conventional and in line with his views. But Valjean going away for a few days was really nothing to him.

Cosette, on the other hand…It would be better if he could take her with him. He could not, though. Toulon was no place for a child and even if he kept her well away from the prison how could he make sure that she saw no convicts? They were everywhere. She would not understand and he could not explain. What if she feared them? What if she thought they were not quite human? What if she hated them? What if she pitied them? No, it was best to just keep her out of it altogether.

And even could he ensure that she would see nothing that she was not meant to, how could he possibly face that with her at his side? It was terribly unfair to her. He did not know how he would react to going again. He did not want to. But he had to, didn't he? He owed it to Champmathieu to see, just once, the hell he had not been able to stop from consigning him to.

Cosette blinked her large eyes up at him. "Oh?"

"I have business I must take care of a few days away. I need to go two days from now. I do not know how long it will take," Valjean continued.

Cosette frowned. "You have business? You will be gone?"

"I am sorry, Cosette, but you must stay here," Valjean said gently.

Cosette blinked rapidly. "Why?"

He was afraid of her reaction. She had been abandoned too much in her life by those that loved her. They had seen no better alternative and had never meant to hurt her but it did not change the past. He did not want to add to that but how could he take her with him? This was better. It was not good, certainly, but it was…better.

"You have school."

"I can miss school," Cosette said. "If you are going to be so long that I would fall too far behind you should not leave me for that long."

"It will not be that long," Valjean conceded with a sigh. "But it is no place for a child."

"If it is no place for a child it is no place for a grown-up," Cosette reasoned childishly. "I don't want you going to any bad place."

"I'm afraid that I have to, Cosette," Valjean said apologetically, warmed by her consideration. "But it will not be long and I will be back as soon as I can."

Cosette pouted. "I don't want you to go."

"I know, Cosette, I know," Valjean said, smoothing back her hair. "But I have to."

"Why?" Cosette asked. "If you do not want to go and I do not want you to go then don't go."

Valjean sighed again. "It is not that simple. Sometimes you just have to do things that you do not want to do."

"But you're the mayor!" Cosette cried out, unable to believe that.

Valjean did smile a little at this. "Yes, I am the mayor but even the mayor of a town sometimes has to do things that he does not want to do."

"Really?" Cosette asked, surprised.

Valjean's smile turned a few shades more genuine. "Yes. Just this morning, in fact, I had to go to a meeting that was very boring!"

Cosette laughed. "Was it important?"

"Yes," Valjean replied, "which is why I went but it was very difficult to pay attention."

Cosette nodded. "It's like that sometimes in school, too."

"But you do pay attention, right?" Valjean asked pointedly.

Cosette nodded. "Of course! I like school. I wish I had it earlier."

Valjean smiled sadly at that and pressed a kiss onto Cosette's forehead. "I do, too, but we cannot change the past, only make the future better."

"You're going no matter what, aren't you?" Cosette asked somberly, staring at him with too-old eyes.

"I'm sorry, Cosette."

"Well…" she said slowly before throwing her arms around his neck. "Come back soon."


	21. Chapter 21

Valjean was not sure what to expect when he set foot in Toulon again for the first time in nearly ten years. He had hoped, perhaps naively, that when he made his way out of that cursed town (which must not have been so bad for those who chose to stay there voluntarily) that he would never have to come back here but he always feared that he would.

What did he know about an honest life, after all? Even his best efforts now amounted to lying about everything that mattered and an innocent suffering in his place. When he had begun to be cheated and rejected and scorned, he had feared that it would not be long before Toulon reclaimed its hold on him. He had not even really appreciated that he was gone before he began to dread this new life parole had given him.

And then when he had stolen from the bishop and, after that, when he had broken parole the fear had grown stronger. Before he had just thought that it was inevitable that something would happen and send him back. Then, now, he knew that he had broken quite a few laws and if they ever found him he would be dragged back here in chains and that this time there would be no way out for him .

And now he was back but the circumstances were some he never could have imagined. He had not thought that he would come back willingly. He was not here to enter the prison as a slave but a distinguished guest. Even when he made the futile choice to try and save Champmathieu, he had chosen only to resume being hunted and not to resign himself meekly to the galleys again.

He had faced the confusion and, in Javert's case, exasperation that came from those he had told of his plans to go to Toulon but no one was slightly suspicious. Cosette had been very upset but he had assuaged her as best he could. But those people, even Javert by this point, saw only Monsieur Madeleine.

Would the people of Toulon even know his new name? If they did, they certainly wouldn't recognize him. But they had known Jean le Cric once. Everyone had known him.

He was pale and trembling when he arrived in town. Riding through in his carriage, he saw a few curious souls stop and follow his carriage with their eyes. They did not seem overly interested but then they could not see him.

The town looked much the way he remembered. On the surface it appeared a town like any other but there seemed to be a faint glow of malice that he was surely imagining. These people of Toulon were just normal people and could not help it if they lived in a town with such a terror as the galley. It was like he was seeing two versions of the town, the version that everyone else could see and the dark land full of shadows that he had grown accustomed to over the course of nearly two decades.

He told himself he was being ridiculous. Even if they all saw him up close and personal, it had been ten years and Jean Valjean was not missing. He was right in Toulon where everyone could see him when he was brought out to work. What must they think of him, those that remembered? What would they think of the way his strength had supposedly failed him and his mind had snapped? Would that have truly been his own fate if not for the bishop's intervention if he had managed to escape prison, with or without breaking parole?

It would take a very dedicated and observant man to see the convict in the mayor and even Javert had been fooled in the end. There was nothing to fear.

But when he arrived at his destination, he stayed in the carriage and merely stared out the window at that hated building. He had not hated in a long time. He had told himself that he was past that, especially since Cosette had come into his life. And he did not hate now, truthfully, but he feared more than he had even feared after learning that the courts believed that they had caught their Jean Valjean at last.

If he walked into this building, who was to say that he would ever come out? If he walked into this building, who was to say that the years of trying to put this place behind him (and it had only been about half of the time he had spent here!) would not melt away and leave only the self that he had been here in Toulon? Without Cosette by his side, could he face this? But of course he could not bring her here. Of course not, it was a foolish notion. He was happy with who he was now and maybe even a little proud though most of that pride had been tempered with the knowledge of the price others had paid for his new and happy life.

But he had been Jean-le-Cric for a great many years longer than he had been Monsieur le Maire or 'papa.' He had been Jean-le-Cric for almost as long as he had been Jean Valjean before that and those years were so often beyond his reach.

"Monsieur?" the carriage driver asked, finally coming around to his side and opening the door for him. "Is everything alright?"

Valjean nodded vaguely. "Ah, yes, the journey was just a little long. It is nothing."

"My apologies, Monsieur," the driver said, bowing his head.

"It is not your fault and it will pass," Valjean said. The driver was still looking expectantly at him so he reluctantly force his legs to move and exited the carriage.

"Will you be staying long, Monsieur Madeleine?" the driver asked.

Valjean quickly shook his head. "I shouldn't think so. Please wait for me and I shall be back in a few hours if not sooner."

"As you will, Monsieur," the driver said with another bow before returning to the front of the carriage and climbing up onto his seat.

And then he was gone and Valjean was alone to contemplate the horror of the task he now had before him.

With no one to push him to move, he just stood there staring and wishing he were elsewhere. But he could not leave without seeing this through and so eventually he closed his eyes and stepped forward.

He was stopped at the entrance by a guard who demanded to know his business and he showed them the letter he had from the commissionaire agreeing to let him enter and speak to one of the prisoners.

That guard called for another and then there was a tall, muscled guardsman with light hair and dark eyes before him and beckoning him to follow.

"I must say, Monsieur Madeleine, that this is all highly unusual," the guard told him as he followed him down the hallway. "No one really wants to come and visit our prisoners in particular. But then, most of them have no family or if they do they don't have the money to make the trip down here."

"I was at the trial," Valjean said shortly. "I am…curious."

The guard laughed at that. "And you shall see! Valjean's an interesting case, you see. He managed to break parole and run for, what, eight years before they catch up to him over some silly little apples! What a farce!"

"I would think that someone who was on the run from the law take care to not attract attention like that," Valjean said neutrally.

"You would think but these prisoners, they never think," the guard explained. "That's why they end up here. Still, I never would have expected Valjean's story to end this way."

"Which way?" Valjean asked, more out of politeness than any real curiosity. "With breaking parole or ending up back in Toulon?"

"It's always a bit of a surprise when someone breaks parole," the guard replied, "because they know what the consequences of that are and are all desperate to stay away from Toulon. But Valjean tried to escape four times while he was here so perhaps it's not so strange that he ran and it's never a surprise when a convict ends up returned here."

"Then what did you mean?"

"I've been here twelve years as of last month," the guard replied. "I was here before Valjean left though not for all that long."

"Of course you could look at his file and see that you were here at the same time," Valjean said, peering closely at the guard but not recognizing him at all. It was not as though he truly expected to. He had not been very aware of the guards, or of much else, for most of his sentence. "But you remember him personally? It was quite some time ago, as I understand it."

The guard nodded. "It was and I do take your point. I don't remember most prisoners after they leave or die but Valjean was different. We were all made aware of those who were at risk for escaping as much as he and then that's the kind of strength you do not forget. It's a pity he lost it. It would have served him well here. And his mind's gone, too, which might be a blessing for him actually. I know that there were some who claimed that he was only pretending to be stupid now and I could see that during his trial but now what's the point? The years have changed him and not for the better."

"I see," Valjean said quietly. He would like to think that the years had changed him for the better and it was hard to think of a way in which it hadn't. He no longer hated the world. He tried his best to help everyone that he could. He was extremely wealthy and respected and even a mayor. The threat of prison was mostly gone from over his head. He had the love of Cosette. But who could have ever imagined such a thing happening when he had first left Toulon? Certainly not him. No wonder it had been so easy for them to believe that Champmathieu was him.

"And here we are," the guard said, leading him to a room. "I know you just asked to see Valjean but his chain-mate is here as well. They're both chained down so we considered it safe enough to leave a guard posted outside the room and let you alone but I would not recommend getting too close to them. They are convicts and who knows what they are capable of? They're all such sly creatures."

Valjean just nodded and entered the room alone.

There were two men in the room both chained down, as he had been told, and neither looking particularly bothered by it. Why would they be, after all, given that this was just one more in a long series of incidents where they were expected to bear chains and not be permitted any sort of freedom at all? He had once complained of how there were chains even when he was sick in bed and couldn't even stand up but it hadn't seemed very remarkable to him then. Now, after all this time, it felt a little less natural to see these men so inhibited.

He had only seen Champmathieu once but that was time enough. The image of that man, so much like him if life had been crueler, had been burned into his very brain and he knew he would not forget. Champmathieu had aged quite a bit in the months since he had last seen him. He was no longer frightened but he seemed as coarse and stupid as ever and an air of bitter hatred seemed to have replaced that. Maybe Champmathieu would never understand why this had happened to him but he certainly understood his predicament now. It would be impossible not to.

The other person was, surprisingly, Chenildieu. He thought it rather unlikely that the two of them had been paired (or paired once more as everyone else would have thought of it) but he supposed these things did happen. He wondered if, after being paired with Champmathieu for all this time, he had realized his mistake. Chenildieu had not been kind at the trial, laughing at Champmathieu and asking if he was 'sulking' that his life was being ruined. But then, Chenildieu was of the galleys and kindness did not, could not, exist there. He had not been kind to Chenildieu, he remembered, when he had first arrived at the galley and was just as terrified as Valjean had once been. He had hated the reminder just as much as he had hated everything. Chenildieu hadn't changed since the last time he saw him, not a bit.

Chenildieu glanced over to see him first and his eyes widened comically. "Well! If it isn't Jean Valjean himself."

Valjean frowned, uncertain as to what he meant. Had he been remembered from his confession? Was Chenildieu mocking him?

"I can't believe you have the nerve to come back to this place," Chenildieu continued, shaking his head. "I know if I had the chance to leave this place behind I certainly wouldn't come back here, not for anything."

Valjean understood, then, that Chenildieu might be the only person in all of France who knew him for what he was. There was something liberating about that, even if it was also highly dangerous.

Champmathieu still hadn't looked up at them. Was he even listening? He did not appear to realize that they were there or, if he did, he simply did not care. Valjean knew that feeling well. If he conceded to being Jean Valjean here where there were no guards it would make no difference as far as Chenildieu was concerned but would it change anything if Champmathieu knew? How could it? If a jury had once heard him confess and still rejected it then who would take the word of a convict over that of a mayor?

But would he then be called upon to deny that he was Jean Valjean so that he could go home to Cosette while Chenildieu toiled here unjustly? He did not think he could do that.

"You know me?" he asked quietly.

Chenildieu laughed. "Know you? How could I now! I might have though this idiot was you for awhile," he indicated Champmathieu, "but after that little confession of yours how could I not know you?"

"No one else seemed to," Valjean replied.

"Brevet and Cochepaille knew, too, but by that point if they weren't going to listen to you then they certainly weren't going to listen to us," Chenildieu told him. "You look better than I thought you would."

What could he say to that?

"You don't look like you're an idiot but you must be if you would try to get yourself thrown back in this hell," Chenildieu said bitterly. "Or being free has gone and made you forget what welcome you would have here."

"I didn't forget."

"Then how can you explain the fact that you would go and confess to being a convict when you didn't have to?" Chenildieu demanded. "They never would have found you, all important whoever you are now, especially not with some poor wretch to put in your place. It is madness."

"It is madness to seek to return to such a place," Valjean agreed. "But I can ensure you that coming back here was the last thing I would have ever wanted."

Chenildieu gave him a thoroughly unimpressed look. "Really. Because that confession of yours seemed to indicate otherwise."

Valjean bowed his head. "My confession was a matter of necessity, I assure you, and not born out of any desire on my part."

"Necessity?" Chenildieu scoffed. "No one suspected you. They were about to convict him before you spoke and did, in fact, convict him afterwards. What sort of 'necessity' are you talking about?"

"It was a moral necessity," Valjean explained. "I did not want to confess and risk going back to Toulon but I had to. It was the right thing to do and my conscience could not let me just ignore it. It is difficult enough to live with the situation as it stands when I have done everything in my power to prevent this injustice."

Chenildieu stared at him for a long moment and Valjean began to get uncomfortable.

"What?"

Chenildieu just shook his head. "Who are you?"

"You know who I am," Valjean said.

But Chenildieu shook his head again. "I knew a Jean Valjean once. You know things about me you couldn't know unless you were in Toulon as well or asked someone who was. But what is all this rots about 'moral necessities' and 'conscience'? You lived in Toulon, you would not…nobody would and certainly not you."

Valjean looked down at his hands. "I did not say that it was easy. But what was I supposed to do? Leave an innocent to suffer in my place while I defied my fate?"

"Yes," Chenildieu said, looking at him as though he were a very great fool indeed. "That is exactly what you should have done. That is, despite your best efforts to the contrary, exactly what you did do. Look at Champmathieu here and let's look at how you're doing and tell me you really think the right thing to do was to be in his place?"

"How can you say it was not?" Valjean demanded. "You are not speaking from a moral perspective, surely!"

"No, I'm not. I have no use for morals here and neither did you, once upon a time. You've gone soft out there and somehow forgot everything you learned here," Chenildieu accused.

Valjean closed his eyes. "If only that were so."

Chenildieu was staring at him with undisguised curiosity. "What did they do to you out there? What happened to you? Did you just hit your head really hard?"

Valjean shook his head. "Nothing like that. I just met a saint whom I stole from and who lied to the police to save me from the galley as well as giving me every little thing of value that he possessed."

Chenildieu laughed. "Is that all? That sounds like an easy mark, not a reason to get all weird."

"He told me that he had bought my soul with that stolen silver and he was giving it to God," Valjean said quietly, almost to himself.

"You do realize he can't actually do that, right?" Chenildieu asked rhetorically. "All this talk of buying souls as if they are anything so valuable! You didn't have to go and lose all your sense just because some bishop was!"

"No," Valjean agreed. "I didn't. But I would not call it losing my sense but regaining it and gaining so much more besides."

"I have seen madmen before," Chenildieu said bluntly. "You should remember how common they are in this place. But you, Valjean, may be the craziest man I've ever seen."

"I've sometimes wondered about that myself," Valjean said agreeably. "But ultimately I am pleased with how my life has turned out."

Chenildieu raised an eyebrow. "Truly? Including the nineteen years in Toulon?"

"Of course not," Valjean said, his gaze darkening, "but I cannot change that and I cannot regain what I lost then. My life since leaving Toulon, however, is very good and I cannot complain."

He had wanted for such a long time for none of that to have ever happened, even if it meant no escaping the crushing poverty that had slowly been killing him or the guilt of never being quite good enough. He still wanted that even though he could barely remember it. But he was grateful for his new life and he had never imagined loving anyone the way he loved Cosette. If he had to choose between them...what a cruel choice that would have been. But there was no point in trying to figure that out since he did not have the option of changing the past.

"I should say not, 'Monsieur le Maire'!" Chenildieu exclaimed. He shook his head. "Ah, there is no reasoning with you! But maybe if I were as lucky as you I could start spitting all this nonsense, too."

Valjean waited but Chenildieu seemed to be done and so he turned his attention to the man he had truly come to see.

"Champmathieu," he said softly.

There was no reply.

Valjean dared move a little closer. He placed his hand lightly on Champmathieu's shoulder and said his name a little louder.

Champmathieu started and belatedly Valjean remembered that he had always hated to be touched in Toulon. No one had touched him after he had left the bishop for the longest time but when little Cosette came into his life he had gotten used to initiating and receiving touches all the time and had come to enjoy them. In Toulon, touches were usually pain and at best were just another sign that he was not a person and could just be touched by a guard in any way at any time.

But he had to get his attention.

"Champmathieu," he said again.

"No one calls me that," Champmathieu said. Now that he was facing Valjean, he could see that his number was 9430. "They all say 'Champmathieu is Valjean, we see through all your tricks.' But it's not a trick. You have to believe me."

"I believe you," Valjean said, an odd tightness in his throat.

"No one believes me. Sometimes I don't believe me. I did not know this place and I did not know these people but they all said that they knew me. Nineteen years here? What about my daughter? What about Monsieur Baloup? Didn't that happen? How can no one see it?"

" 'I am a man who does not have something to eat every day'," Valjean repeated softly. Those had been his words once. Now he only went without when he chose to. Hunger was only a memory growing more distant by the day.

"That's exactly it!" Champmathieu exclaimed. "Except I do not but it's not very good and there's beatings and guards and chains and too much work. I don't shy away from honest work but this, whatever this isn't, isn't it."

"I'm so sorry," Valjean said, finding it difficult to even look at Champmathieu.

This wasn't right. He shouldn't be here. If he wasn't then it would be Valjean in his place and poor Cosette still with the Thénardiers. Oh, he would try to escape as surely as he had tried before and with a new life sentence he would have nothing to fear from a failed escape. Nothing of substance, really, and he thought he still knew how to take a beating. Just the same, he had never been very good at fleeing. More than likely he would still be here even now. He could do so much good free. He was doing so much good free, even more now that Champmathieu had fallen in his stead, and Champmathieu would do nothing but continue to slowly die. He did not deserve Toulon anymore if, indeed, he ever did.

But none of that meant that this was right. None of this was Champmathieu's fault.

"Why are you sorry?" Champmathieu asked, puzzled. "It has nothing to do with you."

Chenildieu started laughing again. "You're wasting your time on this one, Valjean."

"Valjean," Chenildieu repeated. "They all call me that, you know, when they are not calling me 9430 or convict. They called me le Cric at first but they do not do that anymore."

Valjean looked at his feeble arms pityingly. "No, I don't suppose they do."

"What are you here for? You aren't like a convict or a guard so you don't have to be here. Why would you come if you didn't have to?"

"I was at your trial," Valjean told him. "I did not think you should be here. I needed to see it for myself so I would have no illusions about what happened to you."

"My trial," Champmathieu repeated. "I remember my trial. Or should I say Valjean's trial. They all said I was him. Even my lawyer said I was him. I told him I wasn't but he said he had to say I was because then they would be less angry at me and my sentence would be easier. He said I was going to prison and I did. But they did not kill me and he said that that was because he admitted I was who I am not. But he did kill me! They all did. The rest of me just hasn't caught up yet."

It was too much. This steady and earnest stream of whatever was on his head to near-strangers…he knew it well. He had rarely ever spoken in prison but once he had gotten out it was all he could do not to tell the bishop every paltry secret that he had.

This man was him once. If he had been believed when he confessed then he would no doubt be this man again. And Cosette and poor Fantine would be lost and all his hard work undone.

But he would not, could not, be glad when this was what the price paid was.

He had thought that he had been haunted by Champmathieu's fate when he had just seen him once in the court and heard he had been sent to Toulon.

He had been wrong.


	22. Chapter 22

Javert had not intended to go and see Cosette while her father was gone but, as it turned out, he had not had to. Instead, the very day that Madeleine left, she had turned up at the station. She waited until he had a moment to focus his attention on her and was very quiet but just the fact that he knew she was there meant that it was inordinately difficult to focus on his work.

And then she came back the next day and the next day and the next.

By now, he had realized that she was going to keep coming back every day until Madeleine returned. He could tell her not to but Madeleine had asked that he consider looking in on Cosette and so would probably not appreciate if he sent her away.

"What are you doing?" Cosette asked when he finally glanced over at her. He would not admit to be a little concerned when she arrived nearly half an hour later than she normally did that day.

"Paperwork."

Cosette laughed. "What kind of paperwork?"

Now, he could be very narrow and literal in his answers but he knew from experience that she would not stop asking him until she got the answers she was looking for.

"Jean Croix says that his dinner, which he set by the open window waiting for it to cool, was stolen last night and wants me to investigate," Javert told her.

Cosette frowned. "Is that all? Just his dinner?"

"Food is very important to some people and theft is theft," Javert said severely, wishing that Madeleine were more willing to teach her proper deference for the law instead of flouting it whenever he met a criminal he found sympathetic.

Cosette nodded, looking suddenly older. "I know that. But is this Monsieur Croix that poor that losing one meal will ruin him or make him go hungry?"

"No," Javert admitted. "But theft is theft and we cannot let people get away with such things."

"Even if they were starving themselves and that might have saved their life?" Cosette asked.

"Even then," Javert said, biting back yet another lecture about the importance of the law. She had heard it all before, mostly from him, but he did so wonder at what Madeleine was teaching her. Or perhaps she learned it from the Thénardiers or inherited a disrespect from the law from her prostitute mother or whoever her father turned out to be. Madeleine's strange and frankly sometimes incomprehensible approach to these matters certainly wasn't helping in any event.

"But how can you possibly find out who reached through an open window, took something, and left?" Cosette asked sensibly. "It's food so you can't even look for it."

"That is a good point," Javert allowed. "I rather doubt I will be able to find out but it must still be investigated. Perhaps someone will have seen something. And if not, it is not as though there are serious crimes being committed on a regular bases here in Montreuil so I have the time to devote to this crime even if the investigation goes nowhere."

"It's good that Montreuil is safe," Cosette decided.

"It is," Javert agreed. "But in order to keep it safe we must enforce the laws and that means that we must hunt down all of the criminals no matter what their crime."

"If you find whoever stole the food, will he get in a lot of trouble?" Cosette asked curiously, biting her lip.

"What do you mean by 'a lot of trouble'? He will go to jail, certainly."

"That man you told me about. He had five years when he stole a little bit of food," Cosette said.

"Jean Valjean." One of these days he'd be able to forget about that man but with all the years he'd spent half-mad and suspecting Madeleine he suspected it would not be until he was transferred elsewhere. "That is different. He broke a window there and here the window was just left open. And the full weight of his possible sentence was assigned and magistrates often interpret the law a little more leniently. No, this dinner thief is not in for five years."

"That's good," Cosette said.

"You're so sympathetic towards a thief!" Javert exclaimed. "What if it were your food?"

"But it's not."

"But imagine that it was," Javert said. Cosette knew exactly what he was trying to get at but sometimes she got difficult like this and he never really understood it and of course she wouldn't explain. Madeleine thought she really didn't understand but he was too blinded where that girl was concerned.

"It's not," Cosette insisted.

Javert gave her a long-suffering look. "Cosette."

Cosette shrugged. "They would not have to steal from us. We help everybody we meet who needs aid."

"It's one thing to give charity to others but surely you would not wish for them to just outright take things from you," Javert argued, realizing that – despite his best efforts – he was once more arguing with a child. It was a little less frustrating than arguing with her father.

Cosette gave another little shrug. "Papa says that if someone steals something from you that you would have given them anyway if they asked then it's not stealing because it's just giving them a gift they didn't know they had."

There was really nothing that Javert trusted himself to say to that so he simply closed his eyes.

After a few minutes, Cosette said in a quiet voice, "I miss Papa."

What was he supposed to say to that? What did he know of such things? He had never met his father and he never wanted to. And he certainly couldn't say that he missed his fortune teller of a mother who had saddled him with such a heavy burden and no choice but to be a criminal or an upholder of the law. And while he did genuinely enjoy his work and having a place in this world, it might have been nice if he had ever had any choice about it. Yes, he supposed that he had chosen guard over convict but he had seen convicts. He knew what they were, how they lived, what they were worth. How could any sane man choose otherwise?

He wondered, vaguely, what else he could have ever been. He had known for so long that he had only two paths open to him that he couldn't even begin to imagine what else he could have been if things had been different. But that was the point about things being different, wasn't it? Depending on how different they were he could have been anything or anyone. Maybe he could have even had a family if his parents had had an ounce of decency in them.

But such things were not to be and Cosette, despite her prostitute mother, was evidently not to be burdened with that same dichotomy.

"Yes, well, he'll be back soon enough," he said gruffly.

\----

Valjean had left Toulon in somewhat of a daze and hadn't wanted to be shut back up in the carriage again so soon even if his only alternative was to wander the streets of Toulon. Despite escaping the prison unscathed and, more importantly, mostly unrecognized, he wasn't eager to try his luck with the townspeople. A few spoke to him as he walked along and he answered them mechanically and that seemed to satisfy them.

No one knew him.

He had spent nineteen years in this place and they had all forgotten. Or rather, they had their own ideas about who he was and couldn't see him standing there even after he had confessed. That was…it was good, in a way, since it meant that he had successfully changed and he did not have to go back to Toulon but then it was not fair to Champmathieu (to put it mildly!) and he didn't like the feeling of disappearing. It reminded him too much of the past and how he had disappeared from his family's life and then they had disappeared in turn and could not be found dead or alive.

He was like a ghost here and yearned to return to the solidness and the warmth of Montreuil and Cosette.

When he was deposited in front of his home, Javert – who must have been alerted when he was spotted entering town – was waiting for him.

"Javert," Valjean greeted him, friendly enough, for all he wanted to do was push past him and go and see his daughter.

Javert removed his hat. "Monsieur le Maire."

"Is everything quite alright?"

Javert nodded. "Oh, yes. There were some minor crimes committed in your absence, of course, but I do not think that your absence was what encouraged them and they have all been dealt with about as well as could be expected."

"That's good," Valjean said slowly, sincerely hoping that Javert was not about to start giving his report right now in front of Valjean's home. Something occurred to him. "Oh, did you stop in and see Cosette like I asked you to?"

Javert got a strange look on his face. "Not exactly."

Valjean's brow furrowed. "How can you 'not exactly' do what I asked? Either you did or you didn't."

"I did not have to," Javert explained. "Cosette came to see me. Every day while you were gone."

"You did not have to?" Valjean repeated. "Were you going to if she hadn't?"

"No."

How very like Javert.

"She has somehow gotten some very strange ideas into her head about crime," Javert said, almost accusingly.

"Is that so?" Valjean asked, amused. "How strange."

"Do you think so?" Javert asked rhetorically.

"I do hope that when she came by she did not disturb you," Valjean told him, ignoring the question. They debated the question often enough as it was even though he knew that he would never change his mind and some days it felt like Javert would be somehow less likely to change his. "Every day, was it? My apologies, Inspector. I know she likes to visit you at work but that seems a little excessive."

Javert hesitated. "It…was not a problem. I was still able to get all of my work done. I am glad that with you returned she will come by less often as it could conceivably eventually be a problem but you were not gone that long."

Valjean vaguely wondered, as he often did, whether there was a kernel of affection for Cosette buried somewhere in there or if Javert was just literally not bothered by her presence and was able to complete his work. He never could tell what was there or what Javert would not admit to or what his admittedly biased eye liked to see. He would probably never know but all that mattered was that Cosette did not think that Javert did not like her or was indifferent to her if she wanted him to like her.

"You believe she will come by less often now that I am back?" Valjean asked rhetorically, almost smiling. "After you tolerated her presence and perhaps even encouraged her all this time maybe she will want to keep coming to visit you." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "She doesn't think your paperwork is terribly interesting."

"Well 'interesting' or not, it is necessary," Javert replied. "And I think her visits will cut down. After all, every time she came she ended up talking about how much she missed you."

The guilt for putting Cosette through that when he knew how she felt about being left behind (even left behind in a far better place than she had been before) was overwhelmed by the warmth that flooded through him at how much Cosette had missed him. He was certain that she couldn't miss him any more than he had missed her because his journey had been more draining than life in Montreuil and he didn't think it was possible to miss anyone more than he missed Cosette but perhaps she missed him a comparable amount.

Javert shook his head.

"What?" Valjean asked self-consciously.

"They all get that look in the end," Javert explained.

"What look?" Valjean asked, tensing slightly. He reminded himself that the next words out of Javert's mouth were not going to include the word 'convict' but some fears died hard. At least he could tell himself those words now and even half-way believe them.

"Fathers," Javert said.

Valjean smiled. He had been called a lot of things in his life, some his choice and others not so much, but being known as Cosette's father was by far his favorite title. Suddenly he couldn't bear to be apart from her for one more minute.

"Have a good evening, Inspector," Valjean told him, pleased to find that he meant those words.

Javert nodded at him. "And you, Monsieur."

"I'm sure Cosette will be around to invite you to dinner soon."

"I really am quite busy and that is not necessary," Javert said as he always did which somehow always ended up meaning yes in the end.

"As you say, Javert," Valjean said before turning his back and entering the house.

How long had it been before he had felt comfortable turning his back on Javert? Oh, he had had to do it many a time back when Javert had suspected him back before the confrontation over Fantine but trying to appear as guilt-free and unsuspicious as possible had never come easily.

Some change was good.

Valjean had barely shut the door when he heard feet bounding down the stairs and saw Cosette racing towards him, a look of pure delight on her face. He was sure that the expression on his own face was not much different. He quickly set his small bag down and scooped her up.

"Papa! You're back!" Cosette cried out.

"Yes, Cosette, I am back," Valjean agreed, closing his eyes and just breathing in the scent of her. With all the renewed guilt he felt over Champmathieu's dreadful fate (he had given up in a way that Valjean himself never quite managed to, even at the end, and he didn't even really understand what had happened) he needed this tangible reminder that there was still good that came from this mess.

Yes, of course his being able to stay in Montreuil and not having to go back to Toulon were very good things for him but they were more selfish good. The good he did for the town hadn't been enough to move him and even if saving Cosette made him happier than he had ever thought possible, he knew that it was not about him but about her. Saving Cosette was a very good thing indeed no matter what he got out of it and he knew that one day, however much it would kill him, if he needed to withdraw from her life at any reason then he would do it. That was how he knew that loving her was a pure and selfless thing, even if he was counting on Champmathieu's condemnation to ensure that that was never necessary.

It was difficult to keep thinking about him but he could never forget that name. He owed that wretched stranger too much for that.

"I missed you so much!" Cosette declared, throwing her arms out for emphasis and nearly smacking him in the nose.

Valjean chuckled and started to make his way upstairs. His bag he could always take up later.

"Did you miss me?" Cosette asked him earnestly.

Valjean was surprised by the question. "Of course I missed you! How could I not?"

Cosette thought about it for a minute before nodding decisively. "Of course you missed me. And of course I missed you. We're family and family misses each other."

"That they do," Valjean agreed. "Or should I say we do? Were you good for Madame Martin?"

"I am always good," Cosette said innocently.

"I'm sure Madame Martin will say the same thing when I ask," Valjean said tolerantly.

"You're going to ask?" Cosette asked, her eyes wide. "Don't you trust me?"

"Of course I do," Valjean assured her. "I just like hearing about how good you were. I heard a little bit from Javert before I came inside."

"I was keeping him company," Cosette explained. "He's always by himself."

"Have you ever thought that he likes being by himself?" Valjean asked.

Cosette shrugged. "He hasn't made me go away so I think that means I can keep doing what I have been doing."

With some people you really needed to be more direct and not just quietly tolerate it and hope they understood what you weren't saying. Valjean would have mentioned that to Javert but he was honestly a little curious to see what was going to happen there.

"Did you do what you went away to do?" Cosette asked him.

Valjean set her down on the floor once they reached the top. "Yes, I did."

"You look sad," Cosette said shrewdly.

"I am, a little," Valjean admitted. "It was not an easy thing I had to do."

"And you won't tell me?"

"I'm sorry, Cosette, but some things are not for little girls to know," Valjean replied gently.

Cosette sighed but she did not protest. "Do you have to go back?"

Valjean shook his head. "No, I don't think that I will. Once was enough."

"Good. And you're not going to leave again?" Cosette asked hopefully.

Valjean smiled. For all the troubles and complications that he had faced and for all the highly unlikely events that led him to this place, he honestly couldn't imagine his life right now being any different than it was. His life now was good and worth living. "Not without taking you with me, I promise."

Cosette brightened back up at that. "Where you go, I go, too. I like the sound of that."

"I like the sound of that, too."


End file.
